[systemd-devel] [ANNOUNCE] systemd 216

[Lennart Poettering]

On Wed, 20.08.14 16:08, Colin Guthrie (gmane at colin.guthr.ie) wrote:

> > We break that cycle by also offering a way how user systemd-sysusers can
> > be invoked with reading its data from stdin. The idea is then that the
> > packages in question duplicate the user definition inline in the pre
> > package, if they need users that exist before the package is installed.
> > 
> > Yeah, it's not pretty, but we couldn't come up with anything better.
> 
> Presumably it would be possible to create a suitable filter in RPM to do
> this automatically as part of the build... I'm quietly hoping so, but
> guessing not!

Yeah, that would be great to have, but we came to the conclusion that
RPM currently doesn't know anything to make this nicer. But then again,
we are no RPM gurus, so maybe there is something how we could
automatically generate these scripts from the RPM contents during build
time....

> Still it's not *that* bad.
> 
> I guess another "solution" is that for a good chunk of these files, they
> would reside in /var and that *should* be something that is actually
> shipped as a tmpfile snippet anyway, not something that is actually
> "packaged" per-se... (although %ghosting would be nice). And assuming
> sysusers and tmpfiles are run as e.g. filetriggers (they are here) then
> the chicken and egg problem goes away! But sadly, this is not a
> universal solution - plus it's a lot of work on the packaging side. Ho hum!

Well, generally there are thankfully not that many files owned by non-root
users in /usr. We should only need to embedd the user definitions in
preinst for very few pakcages.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering, Red Hat