Re: [gentoo-dev] Policies for games dirs, new group "gamestat" for sgid binaries

[Daniel Campbell]

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On 02/19/2015 06:19 AM, Ulrich Mueller wrote:
> Hi all, As decided by the Council in its 20140812 meeting [1],
> every developer is allowed to commit and maintain games ebuilds.
> Furthermore:
>
> | There is consensus amongst council members that specific
> policies | (e.g., games group, /usr/games hierarchy, and
> games.eclass) should |  be settled by the QA team.
>
> In yesterday's meeting the QA team has unanimously accepted the
> following policies (see bug 537580 for details):
>
> 1. Directories /usr/games, /usr/games/bin, /usr/games/lib*,
> /usr/share/games, /var/games, /etc/games, and /opt must be owned by
> root:root and have permissions 755 (i.e. the default).
>
> This will require a small change in games.eclass, because
> currently prepgamesdirs() changes ownership of these directories to
> root:games and mode to 0750, so they are readable only by users
> that are members of the "games" group. With attached patch,
> games.eclass will no longer change permissions of the top-level
> directories (mostly, these are identical to the FHS locations).
>
> If a package needs access control, it can still change ownership
> and permissions of individual files, or of a subdir that it uses
> exclusively. Owner and permission bits of directories that are
> shared by multiple packages should be left alone, though.
>
> 2. A new group to allow setgid binaries to access shared
> score/state files will be created. The name of this group will be
> "gamestat".
>
> It is quite common for upstream packages to save shared scores or
> other state files under /var/games, and access them with the
> program (or a special helper) setgid to a low privilege group. In
> most distros, that group is called "games" (see for example
> Debian's policy in [2]).
>
> Unfortunately, the "games" group (gid 35) cannot be used for that
> purpose in Gentoo, because by the long-standing games.eclass policy
> it was/is used to control access to games. Therefore, regular users
> on many Gentoo systems will be in this group.
>
> Gid 36 is available and can be used for the new "gamestat" group. I
> don't think that we need a new eclass for this; creation of the
> group would be simply one line in pkg_setup():
>
> enewgroup gamestat 36
>
> Ulrich
>
> [1]
> http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/council/meeting-logs/20140812-summary.txt
>
>
[2]
https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-customized-programs.html#s11.11
>

When this becomes more widespread, what action are users urged to take
in order to "migrate" to the new system? Should our everyday user
account be removed from the `games` group, and the group should be
removed altogether?
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