> I haven't tried it but I would assume that if the user exists then the
> package uses that. So cresting a template /etc/passwd before
> installing packages would fix this.
That works, indeed. Maybe Someone™ should develop a small "UGID server"
which integrates into Debian's `adduser/addgroup` system (i.e. those
tools would first ask the UGID server if that user has already been
allocated an ID and if not register a new ID for it), so you can run
such a server locally and tell Debian to use it so that all your
machines share the same UID/GID namespace.
Sounds like we're going to re-implement Yellow Pages? (yp) :-)
Andy Smith mentions in his follow-on to this email that this kind of standardization is done "locally" with configuration management software (salt, ansible, CloudFormation....). You don't need to have hundreds to thousands of servers for configuration management software to make your computing life easier.