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

[William L. Thomson Jr.]

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...

> > 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 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.

> 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.

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

> 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.

> 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.

> > > 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.

-- 
William L. Thomson Jr.