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

[Michael A. Peters]

On Wed, 2005-07-06 at 20:52 -0400, Matthew Miller wrote:

> 
> I have no idea why you're all on about /home.

Because you described the same process I use - /home is its own
partition, I don't do upgrades - I do clean installs formatting / but
not formatting /home.

Then after firstboot - I add my user accounts, and yum install anything
from extras/livna.

No uid/gid problems.

If there is other data I need to preserve that are not already owned by
core, I can add those uid/gid's from my saved passwd and group files so
that the same uid/gid is used.

There is thus no conflict - no need to reserve an extra range of uid/gid
for extras (or any other repository). As long as the package adds its
user as a system account or is already present from previous /etc/passwd
file - there are no conflicts, none. If the rpm doesn't add the user as
a system user - then there is a bug in the packaging.

non core packages that depend on a particular user/group really should
add that user itself - that way you can use a macro do define where its
home directory is (if needed) and if it adds the user/group itself, with
the -r switch, it won't conflict with anything else. Sure - it may be a
different uid/gid on my machine than yours - but so what? That's only an
issue if we are on the same network, in which case the network admin
should decide what uid/gid is used.

I guess what I'm trying to say is I don't see a problem with the way it
is currently done, nor do I see how a registry of uid/gid's solves
anything.