it appears that nethack is installed with the suid bit set. it's chown'ed games:games. however, the gnome front end wants to make sure some directories in my $HOME exist and tries to mkdir() them. $HOME does not let other users write to it, so nethack errors out with: > nethack Gnome-ERROR **: Could not create per-user Gnome directory </root/.gnome> - aborting aborting... Aborted if i remove the suid bit, it seems nethack can't write to its own directory: > nethack Warning: cannot write scoreboard file record No write permission to lock perm! not sure how this ought to be handled, but it seems the current strategy doesn't work (at least for the gnome front end).
*** Bug 16162 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
ok, i removed the setuid bit so it should work now http://cvs.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/gentoo-x86/app-games/nethack/nethack-3.4.1.ebuild.diff?r1=1.6&r2=1.7
works now ...
