On Thu, 18 Jan 2024, David Chmelik wrote:
Couldn't Debian standardize uid:gid numbers for daemons? The oldest--and only strictly UNIX-like--GNU/Linux (Slackware) does this so if you install multiple instances and want them the same, you can backup /etc/passwd & / etc/group from one and use them on another (as long as there aren't different users which is sometimes the case). This standardization was probably from UNIX/*BSD. What happens every time I can't use *BSD or Slackware on a server and resort to Devuan (or Debian-based for some users' PCs) is that all the uid:gid seem random so there's no way to administer them all with the same files in cases that it'd work. Having random uid:gid is a last-rate style.
I haven't tried it but I would assume that if the user exists then the package uses that. So cresting a template /etc/passwd before installing packages would fix this. I agree this is annoying, and hardish to fix once servers are deployed.
