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Re: Too many users



Hi,

On Thu, 26 Nov 1998, Santiago Vila wrote:

> I was told a few weeks ago that in the FSF some people do not upgrade
> their Debian 1.3.1 systems to 2.0 because of this problem (the great
> number of pre-allocated uids).
> 
> It seems they share their passwd files with non-Debian machines, which
> they cannot change so easily.

What strange reasoning from the fsf people then...  While I agree that the
current behaviour is not the most elegant possible, I don't believe that
debian will forcefully replace your working passwd file with a "generic"
one (imagine the grief of having the root password standardised...) 
Neither is it forbidden to remove users/groups that you don't like from
the passwd/group files. 

Of course I do agree with anybody that it might be better if some of the
standard users weren't preallocated in the first place.  Especially since
the adduser/deluser and aggroup/delgroup interfaces to the passwd resp.
group files exist and can be used by maintainer scripts.

Cheers,


Joost


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