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

[Yousong Zhou]

On 16 May 2017 at 00:02, Val Kulkov <val.kulkov at gmail.com> wrote:
> I agree that not depending on the manual cooperation across groups of
> people would be ideal. However, updating 35+ packages to use the
> auto-allocation mechanism is not an easy undertaking.

Updating 35+ packages is easy with a few lines of shell scripting.

> Besides, some of
> the packages might actually rely on particular numeric uid/gid's - we
> don't know until we run tests with these packages.

Thanks for the reminder.  It feels secure that you know someone is
watching your back.  If the changes are to be made for good, we should
of course fix those beforehand those we already know will break.  As
for the unknown, how bad and in what scale and how high the
possibilities they will break?

>
> Here is another suggestion. make menuconfig might collect all USERID:=
> strings from all packages and produce a list of uids and gids that
> have been taken so that the auto-allocation mechanism will stay away
> from these uids/gids. Such lists will likely be fairly compact, taking
> perhaps less than 500 bytes. This will (1) avoid conflicts between
> packages, (2) avoid the need to re-do the uid/gid allocation for 35+
> packages, and (3) not require manual cooperation between groups of
> people in the future.
>

Future posts may refer to this one as "these are legacies of a
previous decision for historical reasons".

Thinking that we have talked too much and given enough proposals in
this thread, I prepared a doc trying to do a quick sum up.  Please
give further comments there.  Hopefully we can come to a conclusion
and take actions thereafter.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/15kD_-9wCW5mjI8aJaCT03Uoxde3rrtCdZWcaz-5mEtA/edit?usp=sharing

Regards,
                yousong