On 03/10/15 at 10:58am, Gaetan Bisson wrote:
Dear all,
Following up on the User/Group management TODO list [1], I'd like to merge the users and group from the UID/GID Database [2] into the passwd and group files our filesystem package provides.
[1] https://www.archlinux.org/todo/usergroup-management/ [2] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/DeveloperWiki:UID_/_GID_Database
We all obviously think of these UID and GID as static, and Allan even argued that they should never be removed, so it makes little sense to create them dynamically in packages' post_install scriplets, especially since their values must already be hardcoded into the PKGBUILD to avoid the new pacman warnings (even before post_install creates the UID/GID).
So for those of my packages that have an entry in [2] I'd like to replace the UID/GID management part of the install scriptlet by entries in the passwd and group files in our filesystem package. And I'd also like to invite other devs to do the same.
Are there any objections, comments or suggestions on that?
It is improper for package scriptlets to remove UIDs or GIDs because the scriptlet does not know if the user/group is still needed. Users, however, are free to prune unnecessary UIDs/GIDs after verifying that they are unneeded. That will no longer be possible for static UIDs/GIDs if packages do not create them upon installation. For what it's worth, this would also raise the risk of users blindly removing UIDs/GIDs they still need when merging .pacnew files if we were ever to remove a UID/GID from the stock config. apg