Re: LSB specification for adding users and groups

[Dale Scheetz <dwarf@polaris.net>]

On Wed, 16 Jun 1999, Alan Cox wrote:

> > 2. You can map uid/gid with NFS.  Someone else mentioned this.
> 
> knfsd doesn't support this
> unfsd dropped support for this
> non Linux systems dont support this

These are all "system administration problems", and while not meaning to
trivialise them, we should keep our eye on the target, which is the
vendor's needs.

If such things as actual uid/gid numbers are not needed in the general
environment of the vendor, and he can do quite well with some degree of
predefined group names and user names, then it is only the names that we
should spec, and only try to organize the numerical values if that becomes
absolutely necessary.

While I don't have any real grasp of which is the more likely case, I'm
pretty sure that most of the vendor issues can be resolved by the
specification of names only, with only a few special cases where ids are
required. These special cases will define just how much "organization" of
these numbers needs to be specified. I have this impression based on the
assumption that these vendors are producing fairly high end user apps, and
special knowledge about such system internals are not typically necessary
under these conditions.

> 
> > 3. We can publish a suggested convention for uids and gids outside of the
> >    spec.  If distributions transition to it it, great.  If not, you have
> >    to do uid/gid mapping or sites have to solve it some other way.
> 
> That would be a good idea. Everyone still seems to use similar ids for most
> stuff. As far as I can trace they all kind of inherited the SLS ones
> 
While I am compelled to suggest that we look at the Debian specification
for this, I understand also that such assignmenst are, to some degree,
arbitrary, but that only leads me to suggest the Debian specification more
strongly, as it is just as arbitrary as any other arrangement, and seems
to provide room for all reasonable needs.

While I'm not yet convinced we need to specify numeric values; if we do,
we should choose a good existing solution as a starting point and
incrementally approach perfection from there. The only time we need to be
concerned with the overal acceptance of a specification is if it is weak
or unnecessary.

Luck,

Dwarf
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