Prefixing system users with an underscore?

[Lennart Poettering]

Heya!

Many other distributions and Unixes have adopted (or are at least
discussing) to prefix system users and groups with an underscore to
avoid namespace clashes between vendor supplied and user created
users/groups.

To me this sounds like something we really should adopt in Fedora as
well. At least for new system/group users we should mandate this nameing
scheme. Adopting the scheme for existing system users/groups otoh is
probably not trivial at this point in time (though certainly thinkable,
by carefully fixing usermod to allow renaming users and then writing
appropriate rpm scriptlets, that also possibly patch configuration files
referencing the system users in question).

(Don't expect me to work on this though, I am mostly dropping this here,
in the hope that some champion is willing to pick that up and push this
through FPC and fesco...)

Debian: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2014/02/msg00189.html
Suse: http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2014-03/msg00333.html
OpenBSD: http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/~checkout~/ports/infrastructure/db/user.list
Gentoo: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.devel/90748
MacOS X: http://the-mac-os-x-server-mailing-list.10970.n7.nabble.com/Leopard-underscore-user-names-td11346.html

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering, Red Hat