On Sat, 2007-03-10 at 12:16 +0100, Enrico Scholz wrote: > Simo Sorce <ssorce@xxxxxxxxxx> writes: > > > Why do we need fixed uids at all? is it so difficult to use > > getpwnam() ?? > > Most filesystems store only the uid/gid, not the name of a user. Do you read what people write at all? Do you know what getpwnam() do ? > I create predictable uids; when I install a package which creates user > 'foo' on machine A and on machine B, user 'foo' should have the same > uid (e.g. because they share filesystem resources). I like it too, to > reinstall a system without the need of complicated 'chown -rh' orgies > to make huge data partitions from previous installation usable. Your package worsen the problem does not solve it. If I specify 2 different ranges on 2 machines the UID/GID space still do not match, and you have both the problems of a dynamic uid/gid and those of a variable uid/gid. To me, your solution is still plain broken. Instead if you force packages to use A) dynamic uid/gids, B) to not delete user/groups on removal, then you force them to check for the existing user on installation (just in case you do a reinstall. This way all you have to do on machines that have to share the uid/gid space is to synchronized /etc/passwd and /etc/group _before_ you install the packages on the second machine, and the second machine will be automagically ok. And this is the only system the make any sense to me. > > Either an application needs a fixed uid/gid for some particular reason > > or it just can allocate an uid/gid dynamically. > > Most daemons are candidates for fixed uid/gid; unfortunately, there is > only a small range (0-100) available. 'fedora-usermgmt' *allows* the > administrator to use a free range of uids for service users. No, most daemons are not, I am sorry, there is no technical reason for them to have a fixed uid/gid. After this discussion for example I am going to release one of the uid/gid I reserved for the samba packages, because it simply make no sense to reserve it, I can add 2 lines in the spec file to detect the user if it already exist or useradd one on the fly. > 'fedora-usermgmt' is completely transparent transparent: either you know > about it and use it, or it behaves like a plain 'useradd'. Do you realize this phrase means exactly that: fedora-usermgmt == useradd for all practical purposes ? I think it is even a danger for who is aware of it. What happen to your scheme if you reserve 5000-6000 and then it happens that adding normal users you end up going over that space? Any application that rely on fedore-usermgmt at that point will break as it will try to use normal user's uid/gids ... Simo. -- Fedora-maintainers mailing list Fedora-maintainers@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-maintainers -- Fedora-maintainers-readonly mailing list Fedora-maintainers-readonly@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-maintainers-readonly
