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

[Michał Górny]

On Mon, 2019-12-09 at 13:48 -0800, Alec Warner wrote:
> 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?
>

The latter.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny