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On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 11:07 AM, Michał Górny <gentoo@××××××××××.pl> wrote: |
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> Hello, |
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> |
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> I would like to put an emphasis on the fact that many eclasses |
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> and ebuilds in gx86 are relying on an assumption that the superuser |
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> account is always supposed to be named 'root'. |
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> |
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> In fact, no such constraint exists. Although most users will never even |
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> think of changing the superuser account name, it is perfectly legit |
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> to do so, and to use any name for that account. Moreover, it is |
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> perfectly legit to name an unprivileged user 'root' too. |
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|
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Whether it is legitimate or not is irrelevant. Users can chose to do |
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all sorts of legitimate but in the end utterly retarded things to |
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their systems and developers chose whether or not to support them. |
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gcc flags are a common case here (I can legitimately set a number of |
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flags; but most developers ignore reports with odd flags.) |
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> |
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> Thus, the above assumption is clearly incorrect and may result in many |
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> issues with ebuilds using it. These range from builds failing because |
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> of chown 'invalid user' error to packages being installed with |
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> incorrect file ownership. |
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I'd say the assumption is correct in 95% of cases; so it remains a useful one. |
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> |
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> From what I've heard already, similar problem has hit Gentoo/*BSD users |
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> already, with superuser group not being named 'root'. Although some |
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> files were fixed to properly use numeric GID in the specific case, |
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> no UID-related changes were done. |
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> |
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> Moreover, not all developers agree with the case being an issue, |
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> and they even refuse patches clearly fixing it [1]. Thus, I guess that |
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> a clear policy regarding referencing the superuser account should be |
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> enforced. |
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|
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Users do a number of utterly ridiculous things to their system and |
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developers are free to reject bug reports for any number of reasons |
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(this being one of them.) |
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|
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> |
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> In my opinion, that policy should clearly indicate that the numeric |
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> UID/GID should be always used for referencing the superuser account |
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> as they are fixed unlike the names. |
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Except as stated they are not fixed (as Fabian pointed out). I'm |
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happy to support something like setting ROOT_UID and ROOT_GID in |
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gentoo-x86 profiles and using those. Then if you want to do something |
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utterly ridiculous to your system you can just set the appropriate |
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variables. |
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This will likely take a GLEP though; plus it is a major change to a |
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lot of software we have; are you willing to make said changes? Making |
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a proposal like this is all well and good but you are asking for a lot |
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of work to be done for what is essentially very little gain for users. |
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-A |
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|
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> |
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> [1] http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=315779 |
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> |
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> -- |
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> Best regards, |
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> Michał Górny |
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> |
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> <http://mgorny.alt.pl> |
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> <xmpp:mgorny@××××××.ru> |
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> |
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