Re: SPF - exim4 + debian.org

[Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>]

Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> writes:
> * Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) wrote:

>> Bear in mind that there are people like me who are trying to deploy
>> Debian as the operating system for public login clusters, where we have
>> no way of retroactively deciding that some username isn't okay because
>> it conflicts with a system user.  The standard stuff (sys, bin, etc.) 
>> has been reserved long-back, but we certainly haven't reserved every
>> name that matches a Debian package name.

> Uh, no where *near* every Debian package needs it's own username.  There
> are a few here and there which do outside of the 'standard' stuff
> (mysql, sshd, identd, postgres, smmsp) but not all that many really.

That was in response to an earlier poster's comment wondering why anyone
would expect installing exim to work if there was a user account named
exim.  It's hard to know in advance which packages will create users; I've
been surprised a few times.

> Have you actually run into a problem with these names to date?  I
> appriciate your concern but the only package I know of to do this
> nastiness is exim, it would seem likely to me that if this was really a
> common occurance that there'd be examples and bug reports about it.

It's not that it's a common occurance, since most program names don't
happen to match people names.  It's that when it *does* happen, there
aren't a lot of good ways of dealing with it, and sooner or later it will
happen.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>