This is most illuminating, I thank you very much. Sam Jam
On Wednesday, 18 October 2017 20:09:47 UTC+1, Euan Kemp wrote: > > I'm not certain the exact historical reasons we don't have that > specific eclass, but I can explain the current state of things and why > I don't think it's necessary/desirable to include it going forwards. > > Right now we hardcode a set of users/groups in /usr via our baselayout > repo (https://github.com/coreos/baselayout/), and in addition some > packages (such as rkt) use 'sysusers.d' to express adding users to the > distro. > > The fact that we've got this split across two different mechanisms > isn't great. In addition, baselayout's users/groups are unable to be > operated on by useradd and other tools correctly (leading to bugs like > https://github.com/coreos/bugs/issues/1920). > > We plan to migrate towards user/group management by sysusers > (https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/sysusers.d.html#). > It has most of the functionality we need, it plays nicely with other > bits of the distro, and it's a generic solution. > It works to populate passwd for machines booted with an empty > root partition while also allowing users to make customizations. > > The reason we still have the split between baselayout and sysusers is > that migrating existing machines isn't easy, so we can't simply delete > things from baselayout without additional update/migration work. > > For new packages, if the package can use sysusers, that's preferable. > > Hopefully that makes sense; let me know if I'm missing some detail, > - Euan >
