----- Original Message -----
From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: qmail mailing list <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Friday, February 05, 1999 11:01 AM
Subject: Re: var-qmail
>So what if I include 30 different UID/GID combinations?
If I'm understanding correctly what you want to do, which is include
separate binaries for each UID configuration, at some point it's going to
make your distribution ridiculously big. And besides that, there's STILL
no guarantee that the package will work on every distribution unless you
account for every possible permutation of the UID space. It also fails to
account for the usernames necessary being taken. Yes, qmail is an unlikely
choice, but it's still possible that it's already present on the system.
I think it would be really nice if Red Hat could guarantee a certain subset
of the UID space available to packages like this that need predefined UIDs.
Interactive users already start at 500 I believe, so most anything under
500 is fair game to use. Obviously some of it might be in use, so perhaps
it could be allocated something like this:
0-99: "Essential" accounts (root, bin, daemon)
100-299: Program accounts that don't have UIDs compiled in (apache,
postgres, ftp) and can be assigned UIDs at install or run time
300-499: Program accounts that DO have UIDs compiled in (qmail)
The space from 300-499 would be managed by Red Hat. Application developers
who need this could register a subset of the UID space, which would prevent
conflicts on installation since no one would use this space unless they had
registered it.
This is probably not the best solution but it's a start. Linux shared
libraries were all registered with a central source before the move to ELF,
and that worked reasonably well. In addition, the number of programs that
really require compiled-in UIDs is pretty small, so the registration
probably wouldn't be that big a deal.
Any thoughts?
shag
