remove fedora-usermgmt?

[Michael Schwendt]

On Thu, 8 Mar 2007 22:34:54 +0100, Axel Thimm wrote:

> > So, in your scenario any package that does "useradd foo" goes "boom"?
> 
> No, not my scenario, but any scenario. There are two kind of packages:
> 
> a) packages not requiring fixed uid/gids: useradd -r is more than
>    enough

For single hosts. Maybe. The next time you reinstall from scratch,
you cannot predict whether you end up with the same uids/gids, though.

Just to be sure, don't get me wrong. It's not a feature with a huge target
group.

> b) packages requiring fixed uid/gids: fedora-usermgmt's default of
>    going useradd -r breaks the promise of fixed or semi-fixed uids/gids

For _fixed_ (!) uids/gids, you don't use fedora-usermgmt, but useradd -u.

useradd -r does not yield fixed, static or predictable results. And
fedora-usermgmt (when enabled) gives predictable and static uids/gids,
albeit not fixed ones. You don't need it when you need fixed uids/gids.

Fixed => fixed world-wide => because a uid/gid may be compiled into the
software (!) and must be the same for every installation of Fedora.
This is not something fedora-usermgmt is used for.

> I complain about a tool
> that is supposedly used for the *need* of predicting uid/gid that in
> reality just calls useradd -r.

Well, that's because the default uid range is not allocated in any
official way.

> The current situation with fixed/non-fixed uid/gid isn't ideal, I
> agree 100%, but this kind of fix/workaround just makes things worse by
> pretending to fix something that it doesn't fix.

I don't think it pretends that. See above.

> > > What? It does run at package installation time, right? That's far
> > > from being repository level. To put the above example in very
> > > simple words: Install package A with "usermgmt"-uid 42, then
> > > configure usermgmt, then install package B which will have a
> > > completely different view of "usermgmt"-uid 42.
> > 
> > It provides means to avoid that *if* you want that.
> 
> OK, I bite. Which means does it provide?

less fedora-usermgmt.spec ; echo "And I've never said it would be pretty..."