Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Revisiting GLEP 81 (acct-*) policies (reviews, cross-distro syncing)

[Michael Orlitzky <mjo@gentoo.org>]

On 12/9/19 3:17 AM, Michał Górny wrote:
> 
> 2. Mailing list reviews don't serve their original purpose.
> 
> The original purpose of mailing list reviews was to verify that
> the developers use new packages correctly.  For example, Michael
> Orlitzky has found a lot of unnecessary home directories specified.
> Of course, that works only if people submit *ebuilds* for review.
> 
> However, at some points developers arbitrarily decided to send only
> numbers for review.  This defeats the purpose of the review in the first
> place.
> 

For users like "git" and "ntp" that are shared by multiple packages, I
think the mailing list review is still helpful. We fixed big problems
with those two that only came to light during review. If somebody else
requests a UID for "your" user, that gives you a chance to review their
acct-user ebuild and make sure that it's compatible with your package.

For esoteric packages with a dedicated user, though, you're probably
right. The main benefit of the mailing list posts so far is that they
let me track down pull requests and suggest that people ignore the
example in the devmanual.

If we can remove

  ACCT_USER_SHELL=/usr/bin/foo
  ACCT_USER_HOME=/var/lib/foo
  ACCT_USER_HOME_OWNER=foo:bar
  ACCT_USER_HOME_PERMS=0775

from [1], that would really help people guess the right thing to do the
first time around.


[1] https://devmanual.gentoo.org/ebuild-writing/users-and-groups/index.html