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* bug#25895: Remove update-game-score
@ 2017-02-28  6:54 Glenn Morris
  2017-03-09  8:50 ` Paul Eggert
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 12+ messages in thread
From: Glenn Morris @ 2017-02-28  6:54 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: 25895

Package: emacs
Severity: wishlist
Version: 25.2

I'd like to suggest removing the update-game-score executable and the
associated machinery (Makefile rules, related gamegrid.el complexity).

update-game-score is a standalone executable whose job is to write a
system-wide score file for snake and tetris. For this purpose, it needs
to be installed setgid (or setuid) to the games group (or user), and the
central score files need to be pre-created with the relevant ownership
(see lib-src/Makefile).

In practice, I think this facility is very little used, and so should be
removed so that there are fewer things that need to be maintained.

Non-root users compiling and installing their own Emacs normally cannot
set the required permissions on the binary, or write to a central shared
score directory.

Distributions don't like having setuid/setgid binaries in their binary
packages because of the potential security implications, so tend to
strip them out. For example, in both the Red Hat rpm and Debian dpkg
packages for Emacs, update-game-score is not installed setgid or setuid.
So it doesn't do anything useful for these two major distributions and
their derivatives.

Ref eg
https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/fileinfo?rpmID=8691568&filename=/usr/libexec/emacs/25.1/x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu/update-game-score





^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 12+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2017-03-12 19:06 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 12+ messages (download: mbox.gz follow: Atom feed
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2017-02-28  6:54 bug#25895: Remove update-game-score Glenn Morris
2017-03-09  8:50 ` Paul Eggert
2017-03-09 22:56   ` Glenn Morris
2017-03-10  6:42   ` Ulrich Mueller
2017-03-10  8:16     ` Paul Eggert
2017-03-10 22:40     ` Paul Eggert
2017-03-11  6:32       ` Eli Zaretskii
2017-03-12  8:45         ` Paul Eggert
2017-03-12 13:53           ` Ulrich Mueller
2017-03-12 15:14           ` Eli Zaretskii
2017-03-12 19:06             ` Paul Eggert
2017-03-11  8:30       ` Ulrich Mueller

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