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Re: /etc/group



On 2010-03-02 12:34 +0100, Alexey Salmin wrote:

> Just wondering: why there are so many users and groups which are not
> created on package installation?

Historical reasons, often.  Most of these users and groups are expected
to exist on a Unix system.  Besides, the list of static system users and
groups is really append-only: base-passwd must not remove a user or
group from existing systems for obvious reasons, so a UID or GID that
has been given out once cannot be reallocated ever.

If this were to be redesigned today, I suspect that users like news,
uucp, www-data or list would be allocated dynamically.

Sven




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