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

["Michał Górny" <mgorny@gentoo.org>]

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Dnia 2014-07-30, o godz. 15:44:28
Andrew Savchenko <bircoph@gmail.com> napisał(a):

> On Wed, 30 Jul 2014 12:28:32 +0200 Alexander Berntsen wrote:
> > On 30/07/14 09:26, Michał Górny wrote:
> > > 3. the use of group 'games' to control access to games can be 
> > > deprecated and needs not to be enforced,
> > I  would like the council to consider removing this group altogether,
> > and fixing all ebuilds to not use it.
> 
> 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.

Please tell me, how many uses of games on workstations were actually
prevented thanks to it? How often do you happen to have a station that
has multiple users, games installed and you want to limit *all*
portage-installed games to subset of those users?

This a misguided attempt of fixing a social issue via technical means,
and it backfires a lot. In some cases it's an overkill, in some cases
it's incomplete. Following this logic, we ought to also limit access to
all ECMAScript-capable web browsers and scripting languages, including
the shell... oh wait, we just bricked the machine.

The only correct reason to limit access to games is when those involve
proprietary games for which only one of the users has license. But
then, it's a very big sledgehammer and a very small nut -- think of
the casualties.

> > Maybe we could finally get rid
> > of this[0] 8 year old bug in the process.
> > 
> > [0]  <https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=125902>
> 
> If application doesn't validate its input, this is an application's
> bug.

If users are allowed to edit files they were not supposed to edit, then
it's a distribution bug. Failure to validate input is orthogonal to
this, and should be fixed independently of it.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny

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