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On Saturday 31 May 2003 04:53 am, Martin Lesser wrote: |
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> I don't see any benefits of developing and/or maintaining a predefined |
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> /etc/passwd with more than exactly one entry for root. |
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I'm quite tempted to agree with you, but one problem does come to mind. Unless |
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I'm missing something, it's important enough to prevent such an approach. |
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Say any one of three things happens: |
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1) Your computer has problems and you want to move the drive onto a friend's |
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system to repair it. |
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2) You loose / but not /usr, /var, whatever. You reinstall / but keep the |
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other undamaged partitions. |
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3) You get hacked and have to replace /, but certain other filesystems contain |
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only data and therefore are safe to keep |
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The common thread is that you want to mount a filesystem on a system with a |
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/etc/passwd different from the one that filesystem was created under. |
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Unlike applications, the filesystem can't look at /etc/passwd for the UID/GID |
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mappings. If the mappings on different machines aren't' the same, you can't |
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easily move a drive to another machine and mount it. |
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If you emerge packages in a different order, the UID/GIDs in the new |
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/etc/passwd will be dynamically generated differently, and won't match those |
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in the old system. Changes in ebuild interdependencies would cause this to |
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happen even if you issue the exact same sequence of emerge commands. |
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I can see it being a huge practical advantage to know that two installs will |
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have the same UID/GID assignments, and therefore that disk drives can be |
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moved between them without mismatches. |
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Evan |
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-- |
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