• Re: whether we should combine /usr/games with /usr/bin or not

    From Simon McVittie@21:1/5 to Charles Plessy on Mon Dec 2 14:50:01 2024
    On Mon, 02 Dec 2024 at 21:35:14 +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
    maybe we could also phase out /usr/games? Each time
    I think that making a container image with cowsay for teaching purposes
    is a good idea, I fail miserably because I forget that /usr/games is not
    in the container path by default…

    The games team has discussed this in the past. It's particularly annoying
    if you're using a desktop environment that doesn't add /usr/games to the
    PATH under all circumstances (if I remember correctly, GNOME in Wayland
    mode usually does add /usr/games to the PATH if your login shell is bash,
    but not if it's zsh, because it's unclear which layer of the stack is
    meant to be responsible for providing a default PATH that is appropriate
    for the logged-in uid).

    One reason why it might still be desirable to keep /usr/games separate
    is that it mitigates tab-completion accidents. Games and the sort of game-adjacent programs that you might describe as toys (cowsay, fortune,
    sl, etc.), are often not designed with security in mind, and keeping
    them out of root's PATH is a simple way to avoid accidentally invoking
    them as root.

    smcv

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