Re: LSB specification for adding users and groups

[Tom <tom@trap.mtview.ca.us>]

"H. Peter Anvin" wrote:
> 
> Raul Miller wrote:
> >
> > Daniel Quinlan <quinlan@transmeta.com> wrote:
> > > Okay, could I get someone to summarize the functional differences
> > > between the Debian adduser script and the "standard" useradd program
> > > (originally from the shadow utils and AT&T/SVR4)?
> >
> > adduser is a perl script which calls useradd.
> >
> > adduser knows about debian policy for creating users (such as what the
> > different numeric id ranges are supposed to be, such as the way we give
> > every user a personal gid, such as intializing the home directory based
> > on /etc/skel, ...)  and is generally more convenient to use in debian
> > environments than the raw useradd.
> >
> > I don't think LSB needs to worry about this.
> >
> 
> Th different numeric id ranges are important, though, if you want them
> preserved.  I think recently it's become obvious that we need to provide
> at least one uid range that is reserved for the distribution, so that we
> don't end up having people's real users and package uids conflict.

LSB should probably just declare --system and --user (or something
similar) to specify what kind of account it is.  These options would
choose uid ranges and maybe --user could init the dir from /etc/skel. 
Either that or --range foo for custom ranges.  Eight one would have a
config file to specify what these ranges/differences are.

Range system 0-999
Range admin 1000-1999
Range user 2000-

or something like that...
							- Tom