Re: LSB specification for adding users and groups

["H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@transmeta.com>]

Raul Miller wrote:
> 
> Daniel Quinlan <quinlan@transmeta.com> wrote:
> > Okay, could I get someone to summarize the functional differences
> > between the Debian adduser script and the "standard" useradd program
> > (originally from the shadow utils and AT&T/SVR4)?
> 
> adduser is a perl script which calls useradd.
> 
> adduser knows about debian policy for creating users (such as what the
> different numeric id ranges are supposed to be, such as the way we give
> every user a personal gid, such as intializing the home directory based
> on /etc/skel, ...)  and is generally more convenient to use in debian
> environments than the raw useradd.
> 
> I don't think LSB needs to worry about this.
> 

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.

	-hpa