[gentoo-dev] A policy to support random superuser account names

["Michał Górny" <gentoo@mgorny.alt.pl>]

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Hello,

I would like to put an emphasis on the fact that many eclasses
and ebuilds in gx86 are relying on an assumption that the superuser
account is always supposed to be named 'root'.

In fact, no such constraint exists. Although most users will never even
think of changing the superuser account name, it is perfectly legit
to do so, and to use any name for that account. Moreover, it is
perfectly legit to name an unprivileged user 'root' too.

Thus, the above assumption is clearly incorrect and may result in many
issues with ebuilds using it. These range from builds failing because
of chown 'invalid user' error to packages being installed with
incorrect file ownership.

From what I've heard already, similar problem has hit Gentoo/*BSD users
already, with superuser group not being named 'root'. Although some
files were fixed to properly use numeric GID in the specific case,
no UID-related changes were done.

Moreover, not all developers agree with the case being an issue,
and they even refuse patches clearly fixing it [1]. Thus, I guess that
a clear policy regarding referencing the superuser account should be
enforced.

In my opinion, that policy should clearly indicate that the numeric
UID/GID should be always used for referencing the superuser account
as they are fixed unlike the names.

[1] http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=315779

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny

<http://mgorny.alt.pl>
<xmpp:mgorny@jabber.ru>

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