[Tux4kids-tuxtype-dev] Tux Typing 1.8.0

[David Bruce]

Hi Holger,

On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 5:55 AM, Holger Levsen <holger at layer-acht.org> wrote:
> Hi David,
>
> On Dienstag, 24. November 2009, David Bruce wrote:
>> This is really helpful - I've incorporated these recommendations.
>
> I'm glad to be helpful! :-)
>
>> So
>> now tuxtype's "make install" does this (from Makefile.am):
>>
>> # Global sites for game state data:
>>       $(MKDIR_P) -m 2755 $(DESTDIR)$(pkglocalstatedir)
>>       $(MKDIR_P) -m 2755 $(DESTDIR)$(pkglocalstatedir)/words
>>       chown root:games $(DESTDIR)$(pkglocalstatedir)
>>       chown root:games $(DESTDIR)$(pkglocalstatedir)/words
>>
>> Any glaring security problems in the above?
>
> Why do you chmod 2755 $(DESTDIR)$(pkglocalstatedir)? I think chmod 2755
> $(DESTDIR)$(pkglocalstatedir)/words is good enough..

OK, that makes sense.  I'll fix that.

I did get some feedback from the openSUSE build service list on this
topic.  As it stands now, the rpm packages build successfully but
generate warnings about setgid files, and say that programs with
setuid or setgid files need special permission from the distro if they
are ever going to be officially included.  The packager's guidelines
say that games needing setgid for e.g. a highscore table must open any
setgid files on startup and then drop the setgid privileges so as to
avoid security problems.  I asked about this on the mailing list, and
the one response I got was that if I really wanted to do this, I
needed to create a tuxtype daemon that would securely handle any
needed modifications to /var/games/tuxtype/words...   It seems like it
is going to be complicated to do this in a way that will satisfy all
the various distributions.

> $ tuxtype -w
> there is no soundcard
>
> The "there is no soundcard" message has been there for ages and it has been
> wrong for ages too - I do get sound :-) Still, this message should go away.

This message is generated by SDL, apparently SDL_mixer.  If I grep for
the message in tuxtype's source, I get no matches, but the source for
the SDL libs matches in one spot:

dbruce at dbruce-laptop:~/Downloads$ grep -nR "there is no soundcard" SDL_mixer*9
SDL_mixer-1.2.9/native_midi_gpl/native_midi_gpl.c:348:	fprintf(stderr,
"there is no soundcard\n");

I guess I should file a bug report with SDL.

> Also, when I choose "edit wordlists", I see three buttons, "new", "remove"
> and "done", but there are no (existing) wordlists to choose from...

The editing function can't modify the bundled wordlists (the ones in
e.g. /usr/share/tuxtype), so nothing shows up there until a custom
word list has been created.  The editor certainly has room to be made
more intuitive and better visually organized, but it's a start.

Cheers,

David