Re: [gentoo-dev] Requirements for UID/GID management

[Michael Orlitzky <mjo@gentoo.org>]

On 01/27/2017 02:53 PM, Rich Freeman wrote:
> 
> I'm not saying we can't have random assignment for things where it
> doesn't matter, or fall back to random assignment, but it seems rather
> silly to go to all the trouble to have blockers when it would be just
> as easy to not have a conflict in the first place...
> 
> Telling users that they can't have postfix and apache on the same box
> because nobody can be bothered to pick IDs that don't collide seems
> like an arbitrary imposition.

Agreed, blockers should be a last resort. If neither postfix nor apache
cares about its UID (they don't), then certainly somebody should change
one of them. My first impression is that any package that doesn't care
about its UID should default to "first available", but if that causes
problems, then that's exactly the sort of use case I'm looking for.

If it's a big problem, we can have devs pick an unclaimed UID and stick
with it. Or, if there are 5 users total who need the "apache" user to
have UID 80 across every machine, then it might just make more sense to
tell them to use an overlay to override sys-user/apache.

Keep in mind that currently, if the UID you want isn't available,
user.eclass will shrug and give you a different one. No one can really
rely on consistent UIDs now, but it's not fair to dismiss the idea
because maybe that's one of the things the GLEP was supposed to fix.