maintenance of "setup" and https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:UsersAndGroups

[Colin Walters]

Hi,

I was looking at user/group stuff more as part of the other thread on
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/SystemdSysusers - but let's
ignore that for a second.

So on
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:UsersAndGroups#Soft_static_allocation
- I followed the link to the "uidgid" section, and noticed "Hey, we have
another uid/gid listing here".

Scanning that list, I saw "polkituser"...which:
1) Doesn't exist - the polkit package allocates a user named "polkit"
2) Isn't used even if it did: polkit allocates a dynamic uid/gid.

Now Mirek and I currently maintain polkit, and at least I was unaware of
the existence of this reservation.

Basically, because this list isn't actually *used* by RPM at
installation time, it is prone to desynchronization with the actual code
in the spec files, and it happened in at least this case for polkit.

I did a bit of archaeology in the git log through several whitespace
cleanups/reorganizations and then hit a wall on this commit:
https://git.fedorahosted.org/cgit/setup.git/commit/?id=08258e0f748c4f372fcbf1dd7947c132ee0b8a12

Hard to know what was going on at that time.

Anyways at least nowadays there appears to be a relatively sane SOP for
this wrt filing a trac ticket or bug against setup, but it seems like we
have an opportunity now for some sort of static check to ensure that the
systemd-sysusers snippets shipped by packages actually match that of
setup.

Also, we should audit now to see if there are other packages besides
polkit that are out of sync.