hey steve, On Wed, Oct 26, 2005 at 05:29:46AM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote: > In the general case, I can think of two reasons to remove users (but > leave the ids reserved): namespace pollution, and user lookup performance > when using flatfile /etc/passwd. Neither of these is particularly relevant > for system accounts, but if adduser gained support for something like this I > don't see any reason for system accounts to *not* use it. i was speaking specifically about system accounts, i guess i didn't make that clear. i can see all kinds of wierd problems hapenning when a system-account is removed, but still owning files on the filesystem (perhaps not even files managed by dpkg), and later more system accounts are created. i suppose this could be addressed by "reserving" uid/account pairs so the subsequent additions of the user took the same uid and no other accounts would take it, but that seems like a whole lot of work to do and for no good reason in the first place. sean --
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