On Tue, Jun 19, 2007 at 08:50:46AM -0400, Stephen Frost wrote: > (and Marc can provide his counterpart)
Quoting from http://wiki.debian.org/PkgExim4UserFAQ#head-5f48a235d10056162d9dae836a41e2c423f13e87: The user name Debian-$PACKAGE was chosen in late 2003 when we, the maintainers of the Debian exim4 package found it necessary to create an account for exim to run under during package installation. To avoid accidentylly zapping a locally used account, we intended to use a name from a name space with low potential for name conflicts. About the same time, Fabio Massimo Di Nitto started the same (http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2003/11/msg02231.html) discussion on debian-devel. In this thread, many things were said: * This should be decided by the LSB. However, to my knowledge, that step has not yet happened. * It needs to be in policy. However, policy has not been amended, and there is no bug filed against policy. * Purging a package should remove the account as well. * Special care needs to be taken to avoid removing an account that doesn't belong to us. * The numeric UID shouldn't be re-used. For the namespaces, we have the following suggestions: * Prepend/Append "Debian" or "debian" * Prepend/Append a single )http://cr.yp.to/unixaccount.html) capital letter * Prepend/Append an underscore Unfortunately, the way to get a LSB solution will take way too long. Additionally, the LSB likes to have pre-existing use as example before they change the standard. So, it was our job to decide which account name to use. Andreas Metzler and me chose Debian-$PACKAGE, while Peter Palfrader started using debian-$PACKAGE. So we currently have Debian-exim, Debian-console-log, debian-tor, debian-mixminion and debian-sks. Again, the goal was to create accounts that don't conflict with other, or with manually created accounts, and to get pre-existing use before trying to change the LSB and even Debian policy. Migrating from one account name to another is extremely painful and error-pronce since one needs to meddle with the local account database and has to optionally chown files. Additionally, it is necessary to change every script that accesses the account. To put it short: It's something you want to avoid. This is also the reason why the account names used by these packages will not likely change before a namespace is dedicated and allocated either in the LSB or in Debian policy. The maintainers reserve the right of hurling this FAQ in the direction of everybody filing bugs about the "ugly" account names, and to close the bugs in the process. We would appreciate, however, if people would aid in getting the standardization process under way as soon as possible. This needs to be in policy, the sooner the better. end quote. I do not have anything to add and would appreciate a final decision and a policy amendment. Greetings Marc -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Marc Haber | "I don't trust Computers. They | Mailadresse im Header Mannheim, Germany | lose things." Winona Ryder | Fon: *49 621 72739834 Nordisch by Nature | How to make an American Quilt | Fax: *49 621 72739835 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
