Bug#282184: [Pkg-shadow-devel] Bug#282184: More information needed for this bug

[Vincent Lefevre]

On 2005-09-28 18:16:21 +0200, Christian Perrier wrote:
> All advices I've gathered up to now around me tend to mention that
> having same names for groups with different GIDs in different
> databases is a completely strange idea

Here it was the *same* GID. This is a good idea
  * to avoid clashes with the NIS database by making some kind of
    copy of the NIS database locally,
  * to avoid some packages from stealing GIDs normally reserved for
    the NIS database (the slocate package created a group with GID
    1001).

But I think that having different GIDs may be useful in some cases,
where the sysadmins don't support Debian: Debian packages may want
to create groups whose name already exist in the NIS database.
Unfortunately there are no namespaces to avoid group name clashes.

> which certainly low level tools shouldn't support.

Then the documentation should be fixed.

> The best motivated advice I had up to now as "hey, if you really want
> to do this, why not just use vi on /etc/group|/etc/gshadow?"

What if some script wants to create a group locally?

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Vincent Lefèvre <vincent at vinc17.org> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.org/>
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