Re: Guidance on solving the username namespacing problem
Philipp Kern <pkern@debian.org> writes:
> OpenBSD rather successfully standardized on the underscore prefix to
> eliminate this conflict altogether. I would like that we recommend the
> same thing.
I agree.
> The main question that has been raised was how to manage the migration.
I agree with this too. I'm happy to have Policy standardize this
convention ASAP for newly-created users and then think at more leisure
about whether (and if so, how) to migrate existing users.
> I think the priority should be on stopping the bleeding and new users
> should follow a consistent scheme, but I understand how without a
> migration plan we just end up with "one more scheme" (even if it might
> be the most popular now except using none at all[1]).
In this particular case, I don't think standardizing one of the many
schemes in use would cause problems over the current situation even if we
don't go back and make everything consistent.
> I tried to raise this issue in [2] a year ago, but I think I don't know
> how to even start drafting a policy snippet about this. Would it be
> sufficient to just mandate "In order to avoid collisions with accounts
> created by the system administrator, usernames created by packages
> should start with an underscore." (assuming we could get a rough
> consensus for something like that) in 9.2.1 for now?
Yes. I think we should say something about how packages that started
creating users before this recommendation was added don't need to change
the name of that user (until we figure out a migration strategy).
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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