[arch-general] Reserve UID/GID for unofficial packages

[Christopher Reimer]

Hi,

I'm reposting this topic from the Arch forums here to grab more 
attention from Arch Developers and TUs

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=191918


> Hi,
>
> I'm working on an unoffical repository for VDR (http://www.tvdr.de) on
> Arch Linux called VDR4Arch (https://github.com/VDR4Arch/vdr4arch).
>
> VDR runs as user 'vdr' and needs write access to /var/lib/vdr. There are
> also several plugins for vdr which add files to /var/lib/vdr.
>
> The install script of the package 'vdr' adds a group 'vdr' and a user
> 'vdr' with the IDs 666 (I don't remember why I used 666)
> If a plugin adds files to /var/lib/vdr the install script changes the
> owner and group to vdr:vdr
>
> I did this to stop namcap from complaining. And this worked since the
> release of pacman 4.2.
> Namcap is happy but now pacman complains about the different directory
> ownership between the package (root:root) and the filesystem (vdr:vdr)
>
> Official packages like 'mpd' set gid and uid in the PKGBUILD and
> therefore seem to ignore namcap's warning.
> For official packages there's also a list
> (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/DeveloperWiki:UID_/_GID_Database)
> to reserve uid and gid
>
> But unfortunately VDR4Arch is not an official project. How can I make
> sure no one else uses 666 as UID and GID?
>
> I hope everything is understandable. As you may have noticed I'm not a
> native English speaker.
>
> Thanks in advance
>
> Christopher