This caught me by surprise as well, so I checked a number of other games that drop data in /var/games and they reported the same message...so I assumed it was normal.

File bug reports against these other games. When pacman gives this warning, check the filesystem PKGBUILD to see what permission it gives to the directory.

Note that the dopewars executable should be setgid games:

root:games, 2755 permissions. The score files in /var/games should be owned by root:games also and should be mode 664. This makes sure games can write their hiscores while gamers can't cheat using a texteditor if they don't have root.

*ugh* that's not all that wrong...I just noticed a flaw in setting --localstatedir=$pkgdir/var/games

The score file's default location is hard-coded so I'm going to have to take a closer look at this when I have some more time this afternoon.

you might want to use --localstatedir=/var/games instead unless that doesn't work. Same change for --mandir. Use DESTDIR in the make install line if it support it.

It doesn't unfortunately. The only workaround I can see is to patch the configure file to hardcode the localstatedir as /var/games. Could I be missing something more obvious?

Fortunately, mandir does work as expected..err nevermind, man doesn't work either.

OK, I think it's all fixed up. Thanks for the info, Jan I've corrected the ownership and perms. Eric, DESTDIR did the trick for the paths though I still had to sed the /var/games path.

the install file is missing from svn. I'll check out the /var/games path issue.

I think I fixed it. I'm not able to test because of missing .install file. Make sure it's aware that the score file is in /var/games. Changes:
$ diff -Naur ../repos/extra-i686/PKGBUILD PKGBUILD
--- ../repos/extra-i686/PKGBUILD 2008-11-27 20:14:58.750555937 -0500
+++ PKGBUILD 2008-11-27 21:00:31.186950908 -0500
@@ -18,10 +18,7 @@
build() {
cd $srcdir/$pkgname-$pkgver

- # score path is hardwired so we must set to /var/games
- sed -i 's|${prefix}/var|/var/games|' configure || return 1
-
- ./configure --prefix=/usr || return 1
+ ./configure --prefix=/usr --localstatedir=/var/games --mandir=/usr/share/man || return 1
make || return 1
make DESTDIR=$pkgdir install || return 1

@@ -32,9 +29,9 @@
rm -r $pkgdir/usr/share/gnome

# set appropriate permissions and destinations
- mv $pkgdir/usr/man $pkgdir/usr/share
chown root:games $pkgdir/usr/bin/dopewars
chmod 2755 $pkgdir/usr/bin/dopewars
+ chown root:games $pkgdir/var/games
chmod 775 $pkgdir/var/games

# Handle the scores file creation in the install script

Thanks Eric, it looks like we were working on it at the same time. Good grief, I think it's finally fixed.

I just committed it in truck and pushed the changes to the 686 repo. Want me to do the same for x86_64?

Can you build for x86_64 now? If yes, sure go ahead.

I cannot unfortunately, so I guess that wouldn't make much sense...that's what I get for doing this stuff on the final weekend of school--everything is bass ackwards.

In that case, don't push any changes for x86_64. That will cause a mismatch between the PKGBUILD in abs and the package in the repo. And you risk messing up the db. I'll do the update tomorrow.

x86_64 package done. Close this bug whenever you want.