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

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Fri, Jan 27, 2017 at 2:35 PM, Michael Orlitzky <mjo@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On 01/27/2017 01:52 PM, Rich Freeman wrote:
>>
>> This doesn't really seem like a problem though.  Just have a table
>> somewhere (wiki?) to track who is using what UID/GID and encode those
>> defaults into the ebuild that creates those users.
>>
>
> It should be possible to have two different users with the same UID in
> the tree, just like we can have two different packages that install the
> same file. Eventually somebody will notice a file collision, and then we
> add a blocker per usual.
>

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.  Now, if we have
some longstanding issue from the past that might be another matter,
but what's wrong with just picking an unused ID (again, for stuff that
needs it)?

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.  Sometimes upstream creates conflicts
that are just hard to work around (same SONAME, different ABI or even
API, and so on).  And if we were talking about some binary-only
upstream package that relies on hardcoded UIDs I guess blockers might
be our only option, and users will just have to be happy that we're
able to support it at all.  However, we shouldn't be the ones creating
these kinds of conflicts.

-- 
Rich