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

[Alec Warner]

On Mon, Dec 9, 2019 at 12:17 AM Michał Górny <mgorny@g.o> 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:
>
>
> 1. Mailing list reviews hamper the adoption of new user packages.
>
> Firstly, there are a few developers who obstructively refuse to
> communicate with others and especially to use the public mailing lists.
> While this is a separate problem, and a problem that needs to be
> resolved, this GLEP can't resolve it.  Of course, there is no reason to
> believe that removing review requirement will actually make them migrate
> their packages but it's at least one obstacle out of the way.
>
> Secondly, even developers capable of communication find the two stage
> request-wait-commit workflow inconvenient.  At any time, there are
> at least a few requests waiting for being committed, possibly with
> the developers forgetting about them.
>
>
> 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.
>
>
> 3. Cross-distro syncing has no purpose.
>
> One of the original ideas was to reuse UID/GID numbers from other
> distros when available to improve sync.  However, given the collisions
> between old Gentoo UIDs and other distros, other distros themselves,
> non-overlapping user/group names, etc. there seems to be little reason
> to actually do it.  If we even managed some overlap, it would be minimal
> and quasi-random.
>
> While other distros provide a cheap way of choosing new UID/GID, it
> doesn't seem that many people actually use it.  Then we hit pretty
> absurd situations when someone chooses one UID/GID, somebody else tells
> him to use the one from other distro.
>
>
> 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.
>
>
> 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.
>

What is the mechanism to keep the uid-gid.txt aligned with tree content? is
there a CI check that says I am using the new acct-* eclasses AND I have a
UID / GID assigned that is not matching uid-gid.txt? I see the CI has
"ConflictingAccountIdentifiers", is this already doing this work (checking
that the ebuild matchines uid-gid.txt), or just scanning the whole tree and
ensuring that 2 packages don't re-use the same ID?

-A


>
> d. strong recommendation to use matching UID/GID for the same user/group
> name.
>
> WDYT?
>
>
> [1] https://www.gentoo.org/glep/glep-0081.html
>
> --
> Best regards,
> Michał Górny
>
>