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On Friday 16 May 2008, King Spook wrote: |
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> I was looking at my users and groups on my box, and I realized that |
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> certain services add user accounts with specific UIDs, but then just |
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> gets the next GID for it's corresponding group. I know I, |
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> personally, would like to have the UIDs and GIDs match (and I spent |
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> the time with usermod, groupmod, and find fixing it so it was). |
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> |
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> I was wondering if there was any policy for this (and if so, should I |
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> file bugs?), and how other people felt about this, and if there was |
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> any reason not to have the UIDs and GIDs correspond. |
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The reason is simple - it doesn't matter and you shouldn't concern |
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yourself with such detail. uids map to usernames so that you can |
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concentrate on meaningful names rather than meaningless 16 bit |
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integers... |
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|
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There isn't a one-to-one correspondence between users and groups because |
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this is usually pointless, and because of the following entirely |
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realistic (but made up by me) type of scenario: |
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postfix runs as the postfix user |
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postfixadmin runs as the postfixadmin user |
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mailscanner and spamassassin run as the mailscan user |
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|
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all three daemon users have the "mail" group as their primary group. |
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At this point you have lost the synchronization between uid and gid |
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sequencing and have to insert two blank groups to get it back. This is |
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so grossly inelegant it defies description, utterly completely |
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pointless and a total waste of dev time. |
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Some of these accounts are defined in baselayout - the ones that can |
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reasonably be assumed to be needed on almost all machines. The rest |
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result from useradd/groupadd calls from the ebuild, which simply take |
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the next one in sequence. |
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The only broken app I have worked with in ages that required me to look |
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up a uid/gid for it's config was postfixadmin, for all others I simply |
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used the user/group name, which is totally sensible. |
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By all means file a bug, but be aware Jakub will probably close it |
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immediately as NOTABUG or WONTFIX |
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-- |
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Alan McKinnon |
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alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com |
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-- |
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gentoo-user@l.g.o mailing list |
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