nogroup and nobody
This has been brought up before and appears that
it is not major concern for the Debian community.
However, the current policy of nobody, nogroup
subtly breaks Linux Test Project if you are
unaware of Debian's policy. LTP expects that
if user nobody exists then either a nobody
group exists or it will create one if you
desire. The problem becomes obvious when you
run LTP on a network filesystem using NIS and
ltp has created the group nobody under the NIS
flag in /etc/group. This new group is never
recognised and the hosting server is requested
to fulfil the request, if that server is also
a Debian system then it to will know nothing
about the group nobody, and subsequent tests that
rely on the group produce an incorrect result for
the test. For details on LSB user groups see:
http://www.linuxbase.org/spec/refspecs/LSB_1.3.0/gLSB/gLSB.html#TOCUSERSGROUPS
The efforts of LTP are to test that developing
kernels operate consistently as they mature and
I would expect that the distributions that use
the kernel would be the same, that is they
conform to a standard base LSB and add their
own functionality on top.
Conforming to a standard
base is not to restrict the development of the
distribution though is shows that it is not
regressing from a previous release.
I hope this rant helps in further policy
decisions for Debian, which I might add has
been and will be a great development platform
for me and many others.
My suggestion would be to create:
nobody->uidX nobody->gidX
nogroup->gidY
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Darren Williams <dsw AT gelato.unsw.edu.au>
Gelato@UNSW <www.gelato.unsw.edu.au>
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