[gentoo-dev] RFC: Namespace for users created for packages

[Michal Hrusecky]

Hi all,

interesting discussion started in openSUSE mailing list[1][2] and I would like
to open up the same question on this mailing list.

Basically it is about the following problem. Citing parts of proposal:

Many packages need to add user and group names for their unprivileged daemons.
Many names are short for convenience, e.g. 'pop', 'vdr', 'tor' or 'znc'. Since
there is no separate name space for system users those names may collide with
names of real persons. Sharing a user name between a system user and a normal
user leads to surprising or even security relevant misbehavior as the daemon
user may write to files in the real user's home or vice versa.

Conclusion, in short, is to prefix system users (with some exceptions like root
or nobody) with underscore '_'. So you would get users like '_pop', '_vdr',
'_tor' or '_znc'. OpenBSD already does that[3]. openSUSE proposal with more
details can be seen on GitHub[4].

So the question is, what would you think about such a policy in Gentoo?

[1] http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2014-03/msg00333.html
[2] http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-packaging/2014-02/msg00136.html
[3] http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/~checkout~/ports/infrastructure/db/user.list?rev=HEAD;content-type=text%2Fplain
[4] https://github.com/lnussel/osep_opensuse_usernames/blob/master/opensuse_usernames.txt

-- 
	Michal Hrusecky <Michal@××××××××.net>