Vincent Bernat <ber...@debian.org> writes: > There was no consensus if I remember correctly. And many of the > expressed voices preferred the `Debian-` prefix. As far as I am > concerned, I don't understand why we can't follow systems that have > solved this problem since years by adopting the underscore prefix (*BSD, > OS X), with the additional "plus" that it keeps the name short to avoid > truncation or replacement by uid.
I've started using underscore for my packages that introduce users. I would really like to standardize on some prefix. I realize that Colin (the base-passwd maintainer) doesn't feel like this is a big enough problem to worry about, but I'm not sure if Colin has had the experience of running central authentication services with >250,000 user accounts. Most short alphanumeric patterns are taken over time, even if they don't look like something someone would pick as a username. For example, we had huge technical problems dealing with the conflict over "oracle," which Oracle's software hard-codes as the database user, but which was already the username of a student. I like _ as a prefix because adduser doesn't allow the local sysadmin to create accounts with that prefix without special flags, which I think makes it a more useful reserved namespace. The one piece that we do need if we're going to standardize, on top of an agreement that standardization is useful, is an adduser --rename command. There are a bunch of packages in the archive right now that stomp on the normal account namespace (such as my own lbcd package), but removing and recreating the user has a ton of problems. If there were a way that I could just rename the system lbcd user to _lbcd, with some additional sanity checks, I would do so, and deal with the required updates to the init script and similar configurations. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87y51lmhsn....@windlord.stanford.edu
