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

[Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net>]

Rich Freeman posted on Fri, 27 Jan 2017 16:23:02 -0500 as excerpted:

> On Fri, Jan 27, 2017 at 3:09 PM, Michael Orlitzky <mjo@gentoo.org>
> wrote:
>> 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.
>>
>>
> The ones I listed before were filesystems shared by multiple hosts,
> such as with nfs, containers, and chroots.  Granted, there are ways to
> deal with this sort of thing, but if you want to share your /var/www
> across a bunch of apache servers it would be nice if they all had the
> same UID for apache.

That's what an admin should be taking care of... if they have reason 
(like the given multiple machines accessing the same filesystem reason) 
to care.

And the way they'd do it under this proposal is simple enough.  Simply 
stick the admin-uid/apache (or whatever) ebuild in their overlay, 
uncomment the line in it that sets a specific UID instead of picking the 
next one in sequence, and change that specific UID if necessary for their 
installation.

The admin-uid/* ebuilds, meanwhile, could be pretty much empty save for 
two assignment lines, the commented specific UID assignment and an 
uncommented one listing the user name, and an eclass inherit, with the 
eclass simply reading the assigned name and picking a UID randomly if 
it's not already assigned, either by the user uncommenting the assignment 
line in the ebuild in their overlay, or a previous installation.

Of course the eclass could also check for an override variable, which 
would allow the user a second way of specifying UIDs -- via package.env 
or the like, similar to the way git-r3 allows environmental override of 
commit, etc.

(I say UID above, GID would be handled similarly, presumably in the same 
ebuilds and eclass, with different vars, of course.)

-- 
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"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
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