[systemd-devel] new user/group population on bootup

[Lennart Poettering]

On Sat, 14.06.14 18:34, luigi (luigide at yandex.com) wrote:

> 
> hi.
> 
> i think it will be better that system users with fixed uid/guid shoud be imposed by upstream.
> 
> Do not allow for flexibility for distros in order to make them stable and standardized.

THis can never work, as the UID/GID space is too small for this, in
particular the system user range, which is generally limited to 998
UIDs/GIDs. As we certainly have more packages that need their own system
users than that there's no way besides dynamic UID/GID allocation to
make the best of the limited range.

Of course, it would be great if Linux could use UUIDs for identifying
users, since that is a nicely unmanaged namespace, where no dynamic or
central allocation would be necessary, and some other popular OS has
done that, but well, we have to work with what we got...

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering, Red Hat