Hi Danny,
Am Samstag, den 02.01.2021, 02:40 +0100 schrieb Danny Milosavljevic:
> Hi Leo,
>
> On Sat, 02 Jan 2021 00:16:45 +0100
> Leo Prikler <leo.prikler@student.tugraz.at> wrote:
>
> > > And it indeed is possible to add (uid 4711) in the literal and it
> > > will work
> > > just fine.
> > I'm aware you're joking, or at least I hope you are,
>
> What? It's perfectly reasonable for a distribution to have stable
> system
> user ids.
My reaction to this was not that defaults are bad, but that dispersing numeric literals throughout the code is. Collectively these values specify the contents of a registry, so that registry might as well be located centrally. Or at least, there should be some mechanism to ensure that two services can't claim the same default ID, otherwise the collision will not manifest until somebody instantiates a system with the colliding services.
From the solutions we do have so far, I believe that making user
accounts an explicit part of service configuration (in what shape may
still be up for debate), with reasonable defaults including numeric
UIDs and GIDs (at least) for essential services such as GDM sounds like
the best option. WDYT?
Regards,
Leo
That seems reasonable to me. As for representation, I think there's value decoupling these settings from a service's own config so that support for custom UIDs/GIDs remains consistent across services.