Putting "rm -rf /*" in every ebuild seems like a pretty clear indication of malicious intent.

Can't really picture anyone doing that as a "just trying to have fun" thing.

Yes, but malicious intent for the purpose of having fun watching the reaction. Not malicious intent for the purpose of personal gain, long term access, or government intelligence.

So chaotic neutral? If going by DnD.

More chaotic evil. Personally I'm pretty close to chaotic neutral - varies over time, sometimes true neutral, sometimes chaotic good - and just outright attempting destruction of unknown third parties seems pretty far towards the "evil" side of things.

I would say destroying random things for laughs is chaotic neutral. You do random chaotic things not for pleasure or pain. He isn't doing it for a specific reason but because he can. That's neutral.

A chaotic evil would be destroying out of greed or hate.

Hmmm, dunno. The only evidence being reported is that they locked out the project admins then attempted to destroy everything they could.

To me, that's not a "neutral" thing. It seems like it was only luck that the rm-ing didn't work, else there would be a bunch more unhappiness.

People do run Gentoo on production systems. Though they obviously shouldn't pull straight from upstream without some real testing before deployment, in the real world it does get done.

Hmmm, thinking about this bit more:

> He isn't doing it for a specific reason but because he can. That's neutral.

If the action is to just do something harmless ("echo 'Couldn't have rm -rf-d you there!", then sure it could be seen at neutral. But it was clearly an attempt to destroy other people's stuff or work. That really doesn't seem very neutral to me. :)

Well, it's arguably still personal gain.

It's just of the transient "I had fun from it" kind, instead of something with more tangible rewards (as you mention).

If it was just someone having a lark, there are plenty of ways to do that other than literally attempting to destroy everything they can access. ;)

It's the sort of "fun" that can land the malicious actor in prison.

Almost anything can land you in prison for years, nowadays. But that doesn't mean there's no difference in impact. Gentoo can count themselves as extraordinarily lucky precisely because there is a difference, between getting hit by a troll rather than a white-collar criminal.

Having "fun" by ruining quite a few people's day.

Malicious is malicious.

Looks like a student joke. I just dont know how many files were deleted in such a jokes during education )

forgot --no-preserve-root for it to really take effect properly.

I believe rm -rf /* will work without --no-preserve-root

GNU rm I believe requires the --no-preserve-root flag these days, to prevent that command from happening by accident

The shell expands

/*

, not rm.

It expands to /bin /etc /lib and such and is not covered by the sanity check.