Re: [gentoo-dev] Do we need games group and all that game prefixes?

[Marien Zwart]

+1 on getting rid of the munging. In my opinion games aren't nearly
special enough to get this kind of special treatment.

On zo, 2012-05-20 at 20:16 +0300, Maxim Kammerer wrote:
> Games are rather unique in that they sometimes keep scores across
> multiple users.

Yes, and that's frequently handled by making them setgid to some group
that actual user accounts are not in, allowing the games to write to
their own statedir without allowing users to mess with those files by
hand. Gentoo's approach actually breaks this, as it's already using the
group the game executables are in for access control (so actual user
accounts *are* in the group the game executables are in). This leads to
bug 125902, which contains a lengthy discussion on this same subject.

My personal opinion is that Gentoo's games setup only helps on systems
that have no or heavily restricted network access, no or heavily
restricted access to external media, has actual games installed
system-wide, and needs access to those restricted to some accounts
through technical means. I think such a setup is sufficiently uncommon
we shouldn't specialcase games this heavily to support them. I don't
think restricting games for resource consumption reasons makes sense, as
people will virtually always be able to uselessly consume resources some
other way. And I don't think restricting access to games because they're
offensive/a waste of time/etc makes sense on the majority of systems, as
people will be able to access similar content through other means, or
will be able to install games into their homedir.

However, when this came up in the past Gentoo's games project (which
does an outstanding job maintaining a *lot* of games ebuilds) was
opposed to changing this as the current setup isn't actually *broken*
(for the majority of games), and changing things around a lot of work.
So I'd like to request they reconsider (and start installing new/updated
games in a more normal way), but as they're the ones doing most of the
work here I think it makes sense to leave the decision with them.

-- 
Marien Zwart