Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Revisiting GLEP 81 (acct-*) policies (reviews, cross-distro syncing)

[Michał Górny]

On Tue, 2019-12-10 at 07:44 +0200, Joonas Niilola wrote:
> Hey,
>
> On 12/9/19 10:17 AM, Michał Górny wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > I think the policies proposed in GLEP 81 [1] were overenthusiastic
> > and they don't stand collision with sad Gentoo developer reality.
> > Instead of improving the quality of resulting packages, they rather
> > hamper their adoption and cause growing frustration.
> >
> > The problems I see today are:
> >
> >
> > 2. Mailing list reviews don't serve their original purpose.
> >
> > The original purpose of mailing list reviews was to verify that
> > the developers use new packages correctly.  For example, Michael
> > Orlitzky has found a lot of unnecessary home directories specified.
> > Of course, that works only if people submit *ebuilds* for review.
> >
> > However, at some points developers arbitrarily decided to send only
> > numbers for review.  This defeats the purpose of the review in the first
> > place.
>
> The problem: There is still no any official documentation about using
> acct-, and reviewing it was/is pretty much left on the shoulders of one
> man. It's easy to say on hindsight it was implemented too quickly.

There is official documentation in devmanual [1].

> >
> > 4. Assignment mechanism is not collision-prone.
> >
> > The secondary goal of mailing list reviews is to prevent UID/GID
> > collisions.  Sadly, it doesn't work there either.  Sometimes two people
> > request the same UID/GID, and only sometimes somebody else notices.
> > In the end, people have hard time figuring out which number is the 'next
> > free', sometimes they discover the number's been taken when somebody
> > else commits it first.
>
> If I remember correctly, at one point it was agreed not to paste ebuilds
> because they all just looked similar, but just ask for IDs?

I wouldn't call it 'agreed'.  Someone said something, people stopped
doing.  Nobody bothered updating the policy (in GLEP 81, the rationale
explains it [2]).

> > All that considered, I'd like to open discussion how we could improve
> > things.
> >
> > My proposal would be to:
> >
> > a. split the UID/GID range into 'high' (app) and 'low' (system)
> > assignments, 'high' being >=100 and 'low' <100 (matching Apache suEXEC
> > defaults),
> >
> > b. UIDs/GIDs in the 'high' range can be taken arbitrarily (recommending
> > taking highest free), while in the 'low' range must be approved by QA,
> >
> > c. no review requirement for the 'high' range, just choose your UID/GID
> > straight of uid-gid.txt and commit it,
> >
> > d. strong recommendation to use matching UID/GID for the same user/group
> > name.
> >
> > WDYT?
> >
> >
> > [1] https://www.gentoo.org/glep/glep-0081.html
>
> I think none of the above really prevent collisions for unmotivated
> people. They also still require manual update of uid-gid.txt, and it
> can't be expected everyone does it. Now this is not of a big interest to
> devs, but I believe committing non-dev acct's will get hard here,
> because there might be some "lag" with their contributions vrt. the
> current situation.
>

Hence my idea that if we stop requiring mailing list RFC, we can replace
that with obligatory update to uid-gid.txt.  It should work good enough
for synchronization.


[1] https://devmanual.gentoo.org/ebuild-writing/users-and-groups/index.html
[2] https://www.gentoo.org/glep/glep-0081.html#requiring-mailing-list-rfc

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny