[Fedora-packaging] packages which add user accounts: is fedora-usermgmt the way?

[Ville Skyttä]

On Tue, 2005-07-05 at 14:59 -0400, Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 05, 2005 at 09:33:45PM +0300, Ville Skyttä wrote:
> > One semi-related point: migrating existing packages in public, supported
> > repositories that have not used a fixed uid mapping scheme before to use
> > one is probably not going to be feasible.
> 
> Why not? They'd just be going from some-random-id to some-random-id-which-
> happens-to-be-the-same-every-time-thank-goodness.

Would you change the uid of a user in a %pre scriptlet on package
upgrade if it existed already?  And if that succeeds, what about files
that are not owned by the package, but are already on the disk
elsewhere?

Or would you rather let the existing username have the uid it had before
the package upgrade, effectively nullifying the original goal of being
able to trust that the uid will always be the same?

The above are the approaches I can come up with now to deal with the
migration without declaring valid existing setups broken.  Even if
possible in theory, the first certainly does not sound practically
feasible to me, and the second one does not meet the initial goal.  Did
I miss something?