Re: LSB specification for adding users and groups

[Daniel Quinlan <quinlan@transmeta.com>]

Jakob 'sparky' Kaivo wrote:

>> 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.

Erik Troan <ewt@redhat.com> writes:

> That could be a problem... We need to figure out how to migrate
> distributions to that uid/gid scheme then, and I'm afraid that's
> going to be almost impossible to get everyone to agree on.

We can do several things to work around this problem.

1. The LSB user/group specification can allow distributions to configure
   uid/gid ranges in a configuration file (or leave the selection up to
   the distribution if they don't use our implementation)

2. You can map uid/gid with NFS.  Someone else mentioned this.

3. We can publish a suggested convention for uids and gids outside of the
   spec.  If distributions transition to it it, great.  If not, you have
   to do uid/gid mapping or sites have to solve it some other way.

I actually examined every major distribution (at the time) several years
ago (1995!) and starting writing a suggested convention for uid and gid
numbers, but ever actually finished it.  Debian has something similar
nowadays in their policy.

Dan