Wow.. this thread degraded into insanity rather quickly.

I answered the OP because it's not my place to say what he can or can't do with his phone. I also voiced my agreement that it is wholly a bad idea.

Someone asked me why I thought that.. most others have stated as such in the midst of all this.. I don't even know what this is.. but here's my answer.

A passwordless root enabled terminal is always a bad idea even on desktops. Quite often people will forget which terminal they are in (normal, or root) and run commands they didn't intend. I'm not just talking about "omg I blew my computer up!" type commands, which of course do happen, but I mean simple things such as running a program in the user directories. Sometimes, that causes that program to create files that are now owned and only readable/writable by root inside the user directories. Next time you try to run said program it crashes and you now spend hours (and in the case of the n900 probably come post here) troubleshooting why your app crashes all of a sudden.

An example of this is actually VCMI Heroes 3 port. The maintainer of that originally ran his vcmi as root, and it created an interprocess file that was now owned by root. As such, he could only ever run that program as root.

It's inherently a terrible idea because everyone, I don't care how good you are or how long you've worked with *nix, everyone has their "oh ****" moment. There are some things that should be intentionally left as non-"point click" easy.

Now, this problem becomes extrapolated on a touch screen device. And then even doubled again on a resistive touchscreen device, where anything in your pocket, or dropping it, or whatever can touch the screen, launch your new root terminal and maybe press a few "up" key strokes and manage to find a command that does something rather not good.

So, with a clear head, in full detail - there is far too much risk, and very minimal gain, to be had by automating this particular process. I typically strongly recommend sudo have a password, so "sudo gainroot" with no password is bad enough, but removing any chains at all is just, IMHO, not cool.

But.. the beautiful thing about the N900 is it's your device.. you can make your own decisions. I'll show you how, but that doesn't mean I condone it.

I also disagree vehemently with anyone saying "there is no risk in enabling devel".. um.. yes. There is.