Bug#248809: policy needed for user names Debian name space
Package: debian-policy
Version: 3.6.1.0
Severity: minor
The Debian policy does not define a way for package maintainers to
create Debian-specific user names. This issues was raised by me about
the console-log package, but was discussed well before, relates to other
packages and in future will probably affect more. References can be
found in Bug#248481.
The problem is described in detail below, and a possible solution is
suggested.
The console-log package uses `Debian-console-log' as a user name. This
is done so that is does not collide with user names created by the user,
but has a series of drawbacks:
- if you just try `ls -l /proc' you will see that the output is
misaligned; this is not a bug in ls, it is simply a consequence of the
fact that the name is so much longer than the usual eight characters.
- if you try `ps uaww' you will see that the user name is truncated to
eight characters, that is "Debian-", which makes it indistinguishable
from other user names using the same prefix; this is not a bug in ps,
because any fixed-width layout would have this problem, and a
fixed-width layout is necessary in most instances.
- similar problems happen with atop and probably other tools. The
reason is that, generally speaking, you want `ls -l' and `ps uaww' to
give you room for variable lenght file names or process command lines,
respectively, which are the last fields in the printout, while you
want all other columns to be fixed-width.
Since a proposed standard for user name spaces already exists at
<http://cr.yp.to/unixaccount.html> which does not involve long names
(but capitalized names instead), I think that Debian policy should
include this topic, and assess that Debian-specific user names should
begin or end with a capital D, be unique in their first eight
characters, and not be longer than, say, ten characters.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
APT prefers testing
APT policy: (990, 'testing')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.4.26
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=it_IT@euro (ignored: LC_ALL set to C)
-- no debconf information
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