[LEDE-DEV] convention on uid/gid for packages

[Daniel Golle]

Hi Val,

On Sat, May 13, 2017 at 06:23:29PM -0400, Val Kulkov wrote:
> Is there any convention on the use of uid and gid when creating new
> users or groups? Can someone point me to it, if it exists?
> 
> I noticed that two packages, icecast and postfix, compete for the same uid=87:
> 
> icecast's Makefile:
>   USERID:=icecast=87:icecast=87
> 
> postfix's postfix.init:
>   user_exists postfix || user_add postfix 87

This looks wrong to me (user_add in the init script)...

> 
> There may be more packages competing for the same uid/gid's, I have
> not fully researched it.
> 
> I am preparing a new package, opendkim, which should be run as a
> non-privileged user. For this,
> USERID:=opendkim=<something>:opendkim=<something> seems appropriate,
> but what numbers should I assign?

I run into this issue before and believe that we should have a wiki
page which allows registering static UIDs/GIDs at least for the
packages which actually need that (ie. if a specific UID or GID is
referenced in other packages, or scripts like firewall rules, ...).
Grep'ing for USERID allows to automatically generate that list based
on the currently available packages very easily.

Examples from elsewhere for inspiration:

FreeBSD got those lists
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports/head/UIDs?view=markup
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports/head/GIDs?view=markup

linuxfromscratch got a much smaller list for essential/system UIDs/GIDs
http://linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/postlfs/users.html


Cheers


Daniel