Re: [gentoo-dev] A policy to support random superuser account names

[Mike Frysinger]

On Monday 03 May 2010 03:31:08 Michał Górny wrote:
> On Sun, 2 May 2010 23:57:53 +0200 Enrico Weigelt wrote:
> > * Alec Warner <antarus@g.o> schrieb:
> > > Except as stated they are not fixed (as Fabian pointed out).  I'm
> > > happy to support something like setting ROOT_UID and ROOT_GID in
> > > gentoo-x86 profiles and using those.  Then if you want to do
> > > something utterly ridiculous to your system you can just set the
> > > appropriate variables.
> >
> > ACK. But it should also be possible to specify names here
> > (not just numerical IDs), just in case the underlying kernel
> > doesnt have numerical UIDs at all ...
>
> Most tools which would use these variables (chown, find, install)
> support both numerical UIDs and usernames passed in the same way.

technically speaking, all values given to chown/etc... get looked up as a name 
first even if it is only numbers.  so if you named an account "0", then `chown 
0 foo` would not change it to UID 0, it would change it to the UID of the 
account named "0".

ROOT_{USER,GROUP} makes more sense than ROOT_{UID,GID}
-mike