Re: LSB specification for adding users and groups
On Mon, 14 Jun 1999, Erik Troan wrote:
> On Wed, 9 Jun 1999, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>
> > Th different numeric id ranges are important, though, if you want them
> > preserved. I think recently it's become obvious that we need to provide
> > at least one uid range that is reserved for the distribution, so that we
> > don't end up having people's real users and package uids conflict.
>
> How about just ignoring uids altogether, and only specifiying unames? As
> tar, rpm, and dpkg all set ownerships by uname rather then id, why bother
> specifying the ids at all?
For networked environments (think NFS mounts and NIS). If distribution A
decides that the group mail is (say) GID 12, and distribution B decides
that is GID 8, what happens when you try to NFS mount /var/spool/mail from
a machine running A on a machine running B? All the files have the wrong
group. A base set of UIDs and GIDs is defeinitely needed.
--
Jakob 'sparky' Kaivo - jkaivo@ndn.net - http://www.ndn.net/
"As time goes on, my signature gets shorter and shorter..." - me
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