Re: Bug#134658: ITP: lsb -- Linux Standard Base 1.1 core support package
On Tue, Feb 19, 2002 at 12:09:51AM -0500, Andrew Pimlott wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 18, 2002 at 08:42:38PM -0600, Chris Lawrence wrote:
> I would lobby to change the spec not to mention bin, daemon, or any
> of the optional users/groups, at all. They are not specified in a
> useful way, so they're at best dead-weight, and at worst an
> opportunity for conflicting interpretations.
IIRC, I think the reasoning went as follows:
- The LSB format is based on RPM which has a CPIO archive
- CPIO archives store uid/gids as numbers, not names
- Installed programs may want to use the daemon user
- Hence the daemon user must have a fixed uid
Tar stores names instead of numbers and so doesn't suffer from this problem.
Note that once the program is running, it can use getpwent(). We're talking
about silliness in cpio itself. I beleive the cpio new archive format fixes
but it's not well supported.
> I filed a bug to this effect with a subject like "user specification
> is worse than useless". (The sourceforge page is down, so I can't
> find a URL now.)
Kind of funny that we would have to start changing the mappings of uids
just because some people decided to use RPM as a standard install format.
Ofcourse, I could be making this up...
--
Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org>
http://svana.org/kleptog/
> Terrorists can only take my life. Only my government can take my freedom.
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