[systemd-devel] CoreOS Goal Question: Should we be aiming to be able to boot with an empty /etc?

[Jan Engelhardt]

On Monday 2013-01-07 15:26, Lennart Poettering wrote:
>BTW, Kay and I were thinking about coming up with a simple scheme that
>could pre-initialize a couple of files in /etc and /var that cannot
>really sensibly be dropped. For example, UID assignemnts unfortunately
>cannot be shipped in packages from the distro,

As an NSS module that autovivifies a user entry when first looked up,
or as a boot oneshot service?

>they must happen dynamically on the local system, due to their
>limited 32bit namespace (wouldn't it be awesome to have 128bit IDs
>like a certain other OS?)

I do not see a reason to start using 128-bit GUIDs unless you plan to
hand out static IDs to system services (e.g. the user for apache2)
again.