Philipp Kern <pk...@debian.org> writes: > OpenBSD rather successfully standardized on the underscore prefix to > eliminate this conflict altogether. I would like that we recommend the > same thing.
I agree. > The main question that has been raised was how to manage the migration. I agree with this too. I'm happy to have Policy standardize this convention ASAP for newly-created users and then think at more leisure about whether (and if so, how) to migrate existing users. > I think the priority should be on stopping the bleeding and new users > should follow a consistent scheme, but I understand how without a > migration plan we just end up with "one more scheme" (even if it might > be the most popular now except using none at all[1]). In this particular case, I don't think standardizing one of the many schemes in use would cause problems over the current situation even if we don't go back and make everything consistent. > I tried to raise this issue in [2] a year ago, but I think I don't know > how to even start drafting a policy snippet about this. Would it be > sufficient to just mandate "In order to avoid collisions with accounts > created by the system administrator, usernames created by packages > should start with an underscore." (assuming we could get a rough > consensus for something like that) in 9.2.1 for now? Yes. I think we should say something about how packages that started creating users before this recommendation was added don't need to change the name of that user (until we figure out a migration strategy). -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
