On Wed, 07 May 2025 at 14:40:01 +0200, Simon Josefsson wrote:
I think we should give up on /usr/games and move those
executables to /usr/bin, renaming any binaries that conflict.
This seems somewhat off-topic for a discussion of FTBFS - I hope that
packages don't assume that /usr/games is in the PATH at build time in
any case.
Whether we merge /usr/games into /usr/bin or not, I think it would be a
good improvement **for forky** (not trixie!) to revert the single change
that was made in Policy 4.7.2 (see #1098948), so that it's unambiguously
a bug to have both /usr/games/pacman (a maze traversal game) and
/usr/bin/pacman (Arch's package manager) with different functionality.
I'm sure that's already on someone else's radar, with the most likely
result being /usr/games/pacman getting renamed or removed.
On Wed, 07 May 2025 at 15:45:28 +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
I disagree. root should not have games in his path.
On Wed, 07 May 2025 at 18:17:49 +0200, Michael Biebl wrote:
I personally think that games aren't particularly special in any way
that would warrant them being shipped in a separate directory so I
would welcome if /usr/games became an empty directory (i.e. we move
all binaries to /usr/bin).
Considering whether to move games into /usr/bin and stop recommending
/usr/games is/was #567033. I would suggest reopening that bug (perhaps
after the trixie release) if there is going to be an attempt to get
consensus on doing this. The essence of the decision to be made is whether
the risk of accidents from having these programs in root's PATH
(see https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=567033#119)
is a stronger or weaker consideration than the ongoing maintenance cost
of having a separate /usr/games.
(/usr/games is also the place for game-related utilities like
game-data-packager, game launchers/managers like steam, and
"toys" like fortune, which are not technically games but
share many of the same considerations that I described in #567033.)
smcv
