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
