Re: Pre-Depends for postgresql

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>]

On Sat, Oct 18, 2003 at 04:29:37AM -0400, David B Harris wrote:
> On Fri, 17 Oct 2003 02:18:00 +0100
> Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org> wrote:
> > Uid 31 is reserved forever (speaking as the base-passwd maintainer), but
> > new installations of postgresql should have a uid in the system range,
> > namely 100-999, as created by 'adduser --system'. See the changelog for
> > base-passwd 3.5.0.
> 
> What for, out of curiosity? Just part of the "standard" range of 0-99?

Ids in 0-99 that have once been allocated for a particular purpose are
reserved for that purpose forever even if they're no longer created,
because it's very difficult to deallocate a global static id once it's
been installed on people's systems and packages have started using it
for random files they create. This is one reason why it's much better to
use dynamic ids where possible.

const struct _info specialusers[] = {
    [...]
    { 31, (FL_NOAUTOREMOVE)                             },  /* postgres */
    [...]
};

const struct _info specialgroups[] = {
    [...]
    { 32, (FL_NOAUTOREMOVE)                             },  /* postgres */
    [...]
};

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                  [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]