steve(a)silug.org (Steven Pritchard) writes:
> I agree it can get a bit hairy when several machines share things
by
> NFS, but having a central global UID registry also seems hairy.
In that case, there's NIS/NIS+/LDAP/whatever,
System users should be in /etc/passwd because the requirements for
NIS/LDAP/whatever might not be fulfilled for early services;
e.g. openvpn will be executed before the ldap service so the 'openvpn'
user might not be resolveable at this time.
LDAP/NIS might be unwanted in certain environments also (e.g. on
firewalls, portable machines).
and it is up to the sysadmin to do any extra work necessary to
integrate
the package into their environment. In the case of my openvpn package,
if "useradd -r" does the right thing, then the problem is solved. If
not, the sysadmin can just add an openvpn user before installing the
package.
rpm does not offer a way to determine whether a package creates an user
or not. So the 'just add an ... user before installing' requires lot of
manual work, and automatic updates can not be applied.
Enrico