[Fedora-packaging] packages which add user accounts: is fedora-usermgmt the way?

[Ville Skyttä]

On Tue, 2005-07-05 at 12:25 -0400, Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 05, 2005 at 11:01:30AM -0500, Steven Pritchard wrote:
>
> > In that case, there's NIS/NIS+/LDAP/whatever, and it is up to the
> > sysadmin to do any extra work necessary to integrate the package into
> > their environment.  In the case of my openvpn package, if "useradd -r"
> > does the right thing, then the problem is solved.  If not, the
> > sysadmin can just add an openvpn user before installing the package.

Agreed on all counts.  And in addition to the above, NFS4 should help in
some specific cases too.

> Why should the *default* be "you have to do some extra work"?

It shouldn't, but what do you think can be done about it?  Not really an
argument to any direction, but IMO the extra work not fatally wrong
either because to get into a situation where any of this matters, one
has already had to do some extra work, and could just take care of the
uid mappings while at it.  Shouldn't be a big deal.

> The standard case should be just that -- standard.

If someone can come up with a standard or defaults that do not bluntly
declare existing standards and policies, which have really nothing wrong
in them, as broken or incompatible, that would be cool.  FWIW,
personally I think the time when that would have been really possible
has passed a looooong time ago.

One semi-related point: migrating existing packages in public, supported
repositories that have not used a fixed uid mapping scheme before to use
one is probably not going to be feasible.