Fedora User Management (revisited)

[Mike McGrath]

Enrico Scholz wrote:
> Mike McGrath <mmcgrath at redhat.com> writes:
>
>   
>>> "I do not see a problem with this when consecutive uids are used."
>>>       
>> This is what I've been talking about, just because you don't see it
>> doesn't mean its not there.
>>     
>
> Just because you don't see the Flying Spaghetti Monster it doesn't mean
> its not there...
>
> Please, stop the FUD about problems without naming them!
>
>   
Please see the archives of this thread, not just my comments but others 
as well.  Ignoring the shortcomings of fedora-usermgmt won't make it go 
away. 

1) Doesn't work in any other distro other than fedora
2) Only solves a small problem for a few packages since not all packages 
use it
3) Its proprietary.
4) Very few people use it
5) Its been controversial ever since its inception (otherwise it'd be 
mandatory by now)
6) Most sysadmins solve this problem on their own using well defined, 
tested tools
7) Its author doesn't seem to want to send it upstream to shadow-utils 
for reasons unknown
8) It hasn't gained any other foothold besides fedora
9) Its use isn't easy.  Just in the last two days this thread and the 
EPEL thread have found people using it incorrectly or having it create 
UID's in an unpredictable fashion, and these are smart people.

>> Your fix is causing others a headache, admitting it is the first step
>> to recovery.  Has any progress been made on making fedora usermgmt
>> part of the shadow-utils?
>>     
>
> Adding an '--hint <uid>' option to user/groupadd and giving this to a
> configurable 'translate-id' script might be possible. But there is so
> much resistance against fedora-usermgmt that I do not have desire to
> fight this battle outside of Fedora.
>   
Why should we have to do extra work to get around your hack that seems 
to work well for you and 5 other fedora users? 
>> Have you contacted the packager?
>>     
>
> about what?
>   
About making this transparent to us.  I actually suggested a way for all 
parties involved to be happy but for some reason you're ignoring it.  
Get this integrated into shadow-utils, otherwise its a hack specific to 
fedora.  This isn't that hard, if this was a patch for useradd all of 
our complaints go away because it would just work then.  I've even CC'd 
him on it so you don't have to, your welcome.

    -Mike