On Mon, Jul 18, 2016 at 10:18:49AM -0400, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> I'd like to start a discussion regarding the
"nobody" user on Fedora,
> and propose that we change its definition sooner or later. I am not
> proposing a feature according to the feature process for this yet, but
> my hope is that these discussions will lead to one eventually.
I am not against this proposal. It has been tried at least once before
in the past but those failed due to a lot of programs secretly relying
on the seperate uids and not a lot of people being able to fix it.
I am not 100% certain that it was mostly 99 due to issues with various
network authentication systems from long ago. (ypbind/ldap/etc) where
I remember when this came up before but can't find it now. I think it
was changed to 99 when UIDs went to 32 bit and it suddenly started
being 65535 on some systems and 4294967295 on others. * I was trying to
figure out why 99 was eventually chosen, but can't find it now.
In any case, the regularization makes sense to me.
* At $formeruniversity, we had someone who was trying to back up
/var/log without any special handling for sparse files and they
suddenly got very surprised and upset when lastlog became "gigantic".
Ah, good times.
--
Matthew Miller
<mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader