Re: [gentoo-dev] Re : Modification proposal for user/group creation when ROOT!="/"

[Farid BENAMROUCHE <fariouche@yahoo.fr>]

interresting aproach.
this could work. however, i can see a few limitations:
- you must be root.
- this is specific to linux as of today.
- if you want to hide the mechanism, i don't see how without doing the same portage modifications as in my solution.


but this is maybe worth investigating. my solution isn't perfect too, I admit.



--------------------------------------------
En date de : Ven 30.3.18, James Le Cuirot <chewi@gentoo.org> a écrit :

 Objet: Re: [gentoo-dev] Re : Modification proposal for user/group creation when ROOT!="/"
 À: gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org
 Date: Vendredi 30 mars 2018, 21h56
 
 On Fri, 30 Mar 2018 20:47:20
 +0100
 James Le Cuirot <chewi@gentoo.org>
 wrote:
 
 > On Fri, 30 Mar
 2018 20:23:49 +0100
 > James Le Cuirot
 <chewi@gentoo.org>
 wrote:
 > 
 > > I did
 just have a lightbulb moment though. I've been playing
 with
 > > unshare recently and I
 wondered if we could leverage it here.
 >
 > 
 > >   $ sudo unshare -m /bin/sh
 -c "mount --bind /mnt/somewhere/etc /etc &&
 groupadd foo"
 > >   groupadd:
 Cannot determine your user name.  
 > 
 > Aha! I was trying to do this against an
 NFS share for a system with a
 > different
 architecture. If I use a local mount with a compatible
 > architecture, it actually does work.
 I'll explore this some more.
 
 Figured it out! The system I was doing this
 against has an ancient
 glibc (long story)
 with an old nsswitch.conf. I replaced this file with
 a newer one and it all started working. Do you
 agree this could be the
 way forwards?
 
 -- 
 James Le Cuirot (chewi)
 Gentoo Linux
 Developer