On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 10:55 PM, Alexander Hansen <
alexanderk.han...@gmail.com> wrote:
> My thought is to borrow from what you've done, but do like David and
> Merle suggested and store the following in fink.conf:
>
> AutoUid: boolean
>
> AutoUidBase: integer, default 600
>
> AutoUidMax: integer, default 699
>
> FinkBldUid: the UID
>
> FinkBldGid: the GID
>
>
> AutoUid, FinkBldUid, and FinkBldGid would get set via "fink configure".
> Networked folks would set AutoUid: false via a prompt, and FinkBldUid
> and FinkBldGid would either be autogenerated, use an existing value
> (left over from passwd-fink-bld) or have values set explicitly,
> depending on what the user wants. (AutoUidBase and AutoUidMax wouldn't
> be set by prompts, but would be changed via manually editing fink.conf).
>
As you like, but this seems excessively complicated to me for no real gain.
What's the difference between:
1. Setting AutoUidBase to n
2. Setting AutoUidBase and AutoUidMax both to n
3. Setting AutoUid to false and setting FinkBldUid to n
As I see it, these are basically telling fink:
1. Create fink-bld with UID n, unless it's already used, in which case take
the next available UID.
2. Create fink-bld with UID n, unless it's already used, in which case fail
and don't create fink-bld at all.
3. Create fink-bld with UID n, even if it's in use because I don't care
whether or not I have to users with the same UID.
1 seems the most useful to me. Maybe some people would prefer the extra
control that comes with 2. But why would anyone prefer 3 over 1 or 2? It
seems like a good principle that fink should never create a user with a UID
that already exists. If you believe that, then the only configuration
options which make sense are those giving fink a range of UIDs to use.
And for people who want to control which UIDs fink uses, there are options,
even without extra configuration parameters. They can use AutoUidBase to
restrict the UIDs to a specific range. They can create the fink-bld user
themselves with "dscl". Even if fink has created fink-bld, they can change
its UID using "dscl". If they're on a network, they can create fink-bld on
the central directory and then it will be on all the other computers with
the same UID.
When fink is invoked for a build, it will check whether the fink-bld
> user exists. If not, it will be created using these parameters from
> fink.conf. If the UID and GID from fink.conf are different than those
> in Directory Services, fink-bld will be updated to match fink.conf.
>
As I said, if someone wants to change fink-bld's UID, they can type:
sudo dscl . /Users/fink-bld UniqueID <new id>
This is not really any more complicated than setting a line in fink.conf.
On the other hand, putting some code into fink which will modify the user
database under circumstances where it will only rarely get invoked seems
like a dangerous idea to me.
My opinion is that it would be best to just have two new configuration
settings: AutoUidMin (rather than AutoUidBase) and AutoUidMax. Also, I've
come around to the idea that there should be a prompt for AutoUidMin during
configure (and thus during bootstrap). Probably there should also be a
prompt the first time the user upgrades to a version of fink which uses
this option. I think I'm hesitant only because my annoyance at the passwd
package for requiring user interaction during the build process makes me
not want to add prompts where they don't normally exist.
Dustin
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