On Thu, Jan 18, 2024 at 05:38:37AM -0000, David Chmelik wrote: > Couldn't Debian standardize uid:gid numbers for daemons?
The thing is, Debian has tens of thousands of packages, and any one of these packages is capable of creating new UIDs and/or GIDs if it feels like doing so. There is no centralized place where all of the possible UIDs and GIDs are registered. It's all ad hoc. If a centralized UID/GID registry were to be created, the following results would occur: * Every package that creates one would have to be updated in a non-trivial manner. By its maintainer. Thousands of separate maintainers. A cat-herd of Debian developers, who do this work in their spare time, as they get around to it. * Every obscure, niche package's users and groups would have to be added to every Debian system. I don't even think we *know* how many this would be. Hundreds? Thousands? Do you want a thousand new system users to be created in your /etc/passwd file? Your local UIDs beginning with 1000 might be overwritten. They might have to be rebased to start at 3000, or 5000. Would that be high enough? Would it be future-proof? * Did I mention that every Debian system in existence would have to have ALL of its users and groups redone? Yeah. Just imagine that for a moment. Every Debian system on the entire planet. Every file system on every Debian system. Even remote non-Debian NFS servers. iSCSI servers. Other remote file systems I'm not even aware of. * This change would have to be made by a human being running a conversion script as root in single-user mode, because it would break EVERYTHING that happens to be running at the time. Or single-user mode plus NFS, iSCSI, etc. So that you can update all the remote file systems. While in single-user mode. If such a thing is even possible. This is one of those "the boat has already left the dock" situations. If this were going to happen, it would have to have happened in the early 1990s. There is no feasible way to make it happen now.
