Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: Userkit.eclass

[Michael Mol]

On Wednesday, November 30, 2016 03:25:21 PM William L. Thomson Jr. wrote:
> On Wednesday, November 30, 2016 3:08:30 PM EST Michael Mol wrote:
> > > IMHO it is something that should be  a part of LSB. If not POSIX in
> > > general. One cannot really change the past or current state of things.
> > > But can make
> >
> > the future better.
> >
> > > For now who cares about other OS or distros. If Gentoo gets its house in
> > > order
> > > others may follow.
> >
> > I will note that it's this point when I first replied; that was the point
> > when you chose to expand the scope outside Gentoo.
>
> Stop making things into something they are not. Re-read the above I said it
> should be part of official standards. I also said others MAY follow...

Honestly, that sounded to me like advocacy; "a benefit of doing this is that 
others may follow." If that's not the spirit in which it was intended, I 
apologize.

>
> > > Gentoo cannot force others to do anything.
> >
> > I didn't say force. I said invite.
>
> I never typed the word invite. I never mentioned Gentoo being proactive
> about pushing its specific things on others. Please stop making stuff up
> and going way off topic.

As I note above, I interpreted what you said as advocacy.

>
> > As you noted, Arch appeared to attempt this, and others did not follow.
>
> Arch themselves never got it squared away. It was just a concept. If Arch
> does not implement it how can others? I hardly consider Arch a leading
> distro like RHEL or Debian, which both have derivatives in wide use,
> Fedora, CentOS and Ubuntu.
>
> That right there likely covers over 50% of all Linux installs.
>
> > That's fine. As I pointed out, I only started chiming in when you began
> > advocating exporting Gentoo's list to a broader ecosystem.
>
> You are reading things I never typed, and coming up with some far fetched
> scenarios. Nothing you are saying is anywhere near what I wrote.

Again, read above. If that's not how it was intended, I apologize.

>
> > If RHEL and Debian are consistent from one system to the next, obviously
> > it's sensical to use their list. But why don't they use each others? Or am
> > I missing something, and that's exactly what they're doing?
>
> Going back to my first point about this being part of LSB or POSIX. Because
> it is part of neither RedHat and Debian do things differently.


You're asserting that Red Hat and Debian do things differently because there's 
nobody to force them to do things the same way. It can't be because there's no 
reference for them to look at; for sure, the second into market could simply 
have looked at the first. It's probable they did.

I know Debian starts their non-system UIDs at 1000, while RH, once upon a 
time, started theirs at 500. Why the difference? Dunno. RH came before Debian, 
so I imagine Debian wanted a bit more headroom to work with. Are there static 
UIDs in the 500-999 range on Debian? That would be why RH doesn't use Debian's 
set; they'd have a UID conflict on their hands.

Staring at a CentOS7 live environment in front of me, it looks like RH now 
starts at 1000.

It's probable they could settle on a common spec now, but there would still be 
a great number of legacy systems out there to support., and you've still got a 
very limited namespace to work with.

>
> Why does RedHat not use deb format over rpm. Why does Debian use deb instead
> of RPM.

Well, RPM was developed to be a better alternative to the tarball. Debian 
thought the RPM format was lacking, and developed their own spec. For sure, 
nobody likes to do work for no reason. Even hugely disruptive changes have 
motivations behind them.

I'm sorry, was that a rhetorical question? I just realized...

> These are different distros with different approaches. If their
> UID/ GID are the same, its likely per legacy reasons. Though they may be
> looking at each other.
>
> Debian at this time does not produce a list. The only I found were RedHat
> and Arch, with Archs' being unofficial and never adopted.

I'll note I'm treating the concept of a list as very abstract; if things are 
consistent, then there's de facto a consistent state that could be distilled 
deterministically into a listing.

>
> > Sure. But if you clone a seed node, does it matter that a second
> > from-scratch install may not have the same mapping?
>
> Yes if they are to be added to the same fleet or cluster of systems. In that
> event it would likely start a new from scratch base image. But that is
> pretty rare. I do update base images, though rarely do system UID/GID
> change from initial install.

You know, I would expect for a system of that scale, that you'd have 
standardized and preseeded your passwd and group files with your site standard 
enumerations. It would be trivial to do in any Gentoo install; copy your files 
into place before your initial chroot. All of which you should have scripted 
at this point. If you'd like, I'll send you a link to mine; you can use it and 
adapt it for whatever purpose you need.

>
> > If UID/GID are consistent between RH and Debian, then yeah, what you have
> > is a de facto standard, and it would be reasonable to conform, if there
> > are people who actually have a need for that cross-system mirroring.
>
> If Gentoo does the same, that would make one other and moving all more in
> the direction of a standard.

You spent a thousand or so words telling me how other distros went about 
assigning UIDs for <user#, that hopefully if Gentoo standardized a list of 
assignments, other users would follow--while telling me this wasn't about 
other distros, but specifically about Gentoo, on a gentoo-specific list.

If you're as passionate about the problem as you seem, maybe you *should* be 
pushing LSB to engage Debian and Red Hat, or be the conduit for that 
engagement. Saying that Gentoo should lead by example in the hopes that 
someone else might make the effort for cross-distro consistency is...odd.

>
> > > > More daemons will be build that are intended to
> > > > run as local users. More software will be pushed into opaque blobs a
> > > > la
> > > > Snap and Flatpack.
> > >
> > > I am talking about core system accounts
> >
> > Who decides what qualifies as a core system account?
>
> This is pretty silly now and way off topic. I will leave it to others to
> decide. I would prefer to go beyond just system so it is Gentoo wide. Arch
> was not limited to system stuff, like RedHat and Debian.
>
> Really up to Gentoo Developers to decide it all.

No, that leads to a very serious question of philosophy and ontology. And it's 
a hard question: What defines a core system account? What analytical test 
exists that can sanely provide for statically assigning 999 unique numbers 
such that a smartwatch, an access point, a web server and a virtualization 
host can live comfortably in such a small space?

-- 
:wq