On 10/24/2016 09:12 AM, Tollef Fog Heen wrote: > I'd prefer if user creation was just done declaratively and then we > could scan the archive. If we have a manually-maintained list, it will > get out of sync with reality pretty quickly.
Doing this declaratively would definitely be the ideal solution, no question. (In fact, a lot of things done in postinst now could and IMHO should be done declaratively, such as system services in most trivial cases, and so on.) But then you'd need to first survey the archive to see what things the declarative system would need to address, and then for an automated scan of the archive to yield good results a LOT of packages would have to be switched to the new declarative style. I think this is a very worthy long-term goal, but even mid-term I don't see this as being realistic. Plus, if we had a list now, it would definitely help the people who'd then be working on implementing the declarative system. (They'd have an overview of which packages would be affected, and it'd be easier to to MBF when the system is in place, etc.) Consider that only a fraction of packages actually create users, so while desyncing of the list is a real issue, it's not like this will happen _that_ fast. In the spirit of "perfect is the enemy of good", I think my proposal is an improvement on the current situation. And I did say I'd volunteer to create the initial list. Regards, Christian
