remove fedora-usermgmt?

Michael Schwendt mschwendt.tmp0701.nospam at arcor.de
Fri Mar 9 12:31:13 UTC 2007


On Fri, 9 Mar 2007 09:52:46 +0100, Axel Thimm wrote:

> > > 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.
> 
> Exactly, so what *is* it used for? Not for fixed uids, not for
> non-fixed uids. But for "predictable" ones? Predictable by whom? The
> next package cannot predict what the previous one used, and indeed
> fedora-usrmgmnt is not even used that way.
> 
> So predictable means for a human being that is able to add 300 plus
> 42. What's the benefit of these predictable uids? None, really.
> 
> The promise of fedora-usermgmt was to deal with packages requiring
> *fixed* uids but these ran out so to the rescue came
> fedora-usermgmt. But we now agree that it does not really solve a
> fixed uid's problem, that's good.

Predictable means you can keep the uid/gid constant, but still have an
influence on where that is within your range of values. Everytime you
install a package again on a machine under control of a configured
fedora-usermgmt, the package allocates the same uid/gid.

The only alternative is useradd -u/groupadd -g with a larger range of
uids/gids from which to occupy values per program per distribution.




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