Re: Guidance on solving the username namespacing problem

[Sam Hartman <hartmans@debian.org>]

>>>>> "Philipp" == Philipp Kern <pkern@debian.org> writes:

    Philipp> I tried to raise this issue in [2] a year ago, but I think I don't know
    Philipp> how to even start drafting a policy snippet about this. Would it be
    Philipp> sufficient to just mandate "In order to avoid collisions with accounts
    Philipp> created by the system administrator, usernames created by packages
    Philipp> should start with an underscore." (assuming we could get a rough
    Philipp> consensus for something like that) in 9.2.1 for now? Or is this
    Philipp> effectively infeasible until we come up with a good migration story?

I think you could certainly do  usernames created by packages are
encouraged to start with an underscore.

Encouraged being the new normative word meaning that maintainers ought
to do x unless they have a reason (like an existing username) to do
something else.

You could also do something more complex like

When maintainers choose a new hard-coded or dynamically generated username
for packages to use, they should start this username with an underscore.

Intent there is to capture making it a bug to do something else for new
usernames without making requirements for existing names.

Note that in cases like debconf, I don't think we want an underscore
prepended to what the user chooses, although I think defaulting to
something with a leading underscore would be fine.