Re: [gentoo-dev] Assigning unique system uid/gid for new ebuild

[Martin Lesser]

Paul de Vrieze <pauldv@g.o> writes:

> On Saturday 31 May 2003 10:53, Martin Lesser wrote:
> > IMO a clearer approach could be:
> >
> > 1. The predefined entries in /etc/passwd should be reduced to exactly 1
> >    entry for root, all other (system-)users could be created dynamicly
> >    by the ebuilds without assigning a fixed uid/gid.
> Almost agreed, users like nobody and others are also required in
> baselayout, but the idea is ok.

You're right: users daemon, man etc. are required for a running system
but i.e. user man could also be checked/added by the ebuild for man or
man-pages. Almost every system-user could be added by the appropriate
ebuild so one gets a really 'clean' passwd where only the real used
users appear. Ok, one had to run etc-update more often when setting up
new services, but that's not bad at all.

> > 2. The current ebuilds which assign _fixed_ uids/gids could be fixed so
> >    they don't use the appropriate useradd/groupadd options any longer.
> They should be indeed.

I got a perhaps helpful list of 44 ebuilds where fixed uid's are used
with

# find /usr/portage -name '*ebuild' | \
        xargs grep 'useradd .*-u *[0-9]' | \
        sort -u | cut -f1 -d':' | cut -f4- -d'/'

Not sure whether this result is complete.

Should lintool also check the use of fixed uid's and report this as
error?

And coming back to my original question concerning nullmailer: I will
create my ebuild without a fixed uid/gid and hope that it will not
collide with any other ebuild used in future.

Martin


--
gentoo-dev@g.o mailing list