Re: [gentoo-project] Call for agenda items - Council meeting 2014-08-12

[Michał Górny]

Dnia 2014-07-31, o godz. 11:36:51
Andrew Savchenko <bircoph@×××××.com> napisał(a):

> Hello,
>
> On Wed, 30 Jul 2014 15:48:53 +0200 Alexander Berntsen wrote:
> > On 30/07/14 13:44, Andrew Savchenko wrote:
> > > Please carefully consider this matter. Having a dedicated group is
> > >  quite convenient to limit users from using games on workstations
> > > and is also handy as a parental control feature. Of course, a
> > > dedicated group is not an ultimate solution and can be evaded by
> > > technically skilled users, but it nevertheless helps.
> > If you need to limit users from using games on a workstation, something
> > is wrong somewhere else. As for parental control -- it makes no sense.
> > They can install games locally for their own user,
>
> On noexec partinion for /home and user temp dirs it will be not
> possible to run them.

...which doesn't help with scripting languages like Python or bash.

> > and they can still
> > look at whatever you don't want them to look at using the WWW; and they
> > can also watch films you do not want them to watch, listen to music you
> > object to, or read books you disagree with.
> >
> > Restricting access to games, or indeed films, music, books or other
> > things, is not a problem I think we should be concerned about. It's
> > much too difficult to get right, and in my opinion completely
> > pointless and stupid. If you want to censor your children's access to
> > creative outlets -- do it yourself on your own computer, instead of
> > tasking us with the job. We are not nannies.
>
> It looks like my reasoning wrong was misunderstood a bit. ATM I'm
> not personally interested in these features, but I find them useful
> in some practical use cases. And looks like I'm not alone here,
> because these features were introduced long time ago and for a
> reason.

This is not an argument. Many things were introduced long time ago for
a reason, sometimes because someone made something up. And then they are
kept for a long time for another reason called stubbornness.

> I just want to point out that current games policy have not
> only cons, but also pros. And code to support this policy is
> already here (while it may be buggy, portage itself is quite buggy).

The problem is that the cons outweight the pros, and the pros may be
used by a few users while the cons affect everyone.

> And please do not refer to "other distros", because Gentoo is very
> different by its nature from majority of distros.

Without specifics, this is meaningless. There's no well-defined
'nature' of Gentoo, nor I have any idea how the differences apply to
this specific case.

That said, cross-distribution compatibility is important. If Gentoo
diverges from other distributions, it breeds packages that don't work
properly with other distributions and this is exactly the opposite of
what programmers using Gentoo expect.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny