On Mon, 07.01.13 09:36, Colin Walters (walt...@verbum.org) wrote: > > On Mon, 2013-01-07 at 15:26 +0100, Lennart Poettering wrote: > > > BTW, Kay and I were thinking about coming up with a simple scheme that > > could pre-initialize a couple of files in /etc and /var that cannot > > really sensibly be dropped. For example, UID assignemnts unfortunately > > cannot be shipped in packages from the distro, they must happen > > dynamically on the local system, > > I ship them statically: > > http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-ostree-integration/tree/src/lib-passwd > > But I don't have "packages" - there is no ability to dynamically mutate > your root filesystem while it's running. > > (Note also that gnome-ostree has both /etc/passwd and /lib/passwd, via > https://github.com/aperezdc/nss-altfiles )
Ah, this is cool, I think it would make a ton of sense for general purpose distros to move all the fixed assignments into /usr/lib. Of course, such a solution only solves half the problem since it cannot cover for uids allocated for 3rd party packages. > Well note in the gnome-ostree split-password model, dropping /etc only > deletes users for /home, not the OS. So you basically say that stuff you install on gnome-ostree never can allocate its own UIDs, right? > But dynamically allocating system users per-boot and ensuring that > /etc and /var matches would still be interesting. Uh, yeah, there's still the question out there what to do with fully dynamic throw-away UIDs, for example so that gdm could allocate a UID for each seat when showing login prompts dynamically. This is going to be really hard, since after dropping a UID again one needs a good way to drop all files and other objects the user created before handing out the same UID again, and I do not see how we could deal with that properly. Lennart -- Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc. _______________________________________________ systemd-devel mailing list systemd-devel@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel
