On 11/10/19 12:36 PM, Jaco Kroon wrote: > > What's the motivation for trying to match the UID and GID values from > other distributions? > > I previously tried to motivate a "purely dynamic" allocation with -1, > I'm showing this as an example where such an implementation would once > more be beneficial. >
When sharing resources between multiple systems, you need some sort of centralized identity management. You can put the users in LDAP, for example, and then force everything to authenticate against that. But, doing that right is complicated, and is overkill if you just want to share some files between two machines. Having fixed UIDs and GIDs on all Gentoo systems gives you an easy way to centralize that identity management: in portage, where the IDs are hard-coded. Once GLEP81 has been implemented tree-wide, users can trust that (on new installs, at least), every system user and group will have the same ID. That gives you a simple way to e.g. mount shared apache resources without having to learn LDAP. If our IDs agree with other distributions, then to the extent possible, the same thing works cross-distro. We don't allow dynamic UIDs because it defeats this whole concept. You might not care what the ID is, but some of your users will.
