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

[Andrew Savchenko <bircoph@gmail.com>]

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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.

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

Best regards,
Andrew Savchenko

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