Fedora User Management (revisited)

[Simo Sorce]

On Fri, 2007-03-09 at 11:15 +0100, Enrico Scholz wrote:
> Axel Thimm <Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net> writes:
> 
> >> > But for whatever its worth let's raise the fixed/non-fixed
> >> > cross-over from uid/gid 100 to 200 for F8 or F9.
> >> 
> >> I suggest 500-999; should not break LSB more than the 100-200 idea. But
> >> reuid'ing normal users is much easier than doing this for services.
> >
> > We can only mess with below 500.
> 
> to be more exact: below 100
> 
> 
> > Moving the bar from 100 to 200/anything will already break
> > applications that randomly were allocated to some uid there, and this
> > needs to be fixed per package, that's why we need a F8/F9 timeframe
> > for doing that.
> 
> Why do we want to break existing installations overall? We could use
> exisisting solutions like fedora-usermgmt after ironing out documentation
> issues.

Why do we need fixed uids at all? is it so difficult to use
getpwnam() ??

> When my shadow-utils patch gets accepted, shadow-util's '--hint' option
> can be used too.

I don't see grabbing random areas above 500 to serve any useful purpose,
if they are not fixed, than you can easily just do dynamic allocation,
from the app point of view it is exactly the same. I really do not
understand what you think you fix by creating a range variable fixed
scheme. 
Either an application needs a fixed uid/gid for some particular reason
or it just can allocate an uid/gid dynamically.

So where is really the problem??

Simo.