[Pkg-shadow-devel] fixed uid for postgres

[Colin Watson]

On Thu, Oct 30, 2025 at 03:23:32PM +0300, Олег Самойлов wrote:
>   Sometimes fixed uid for postgres may be useful. For instance, when
>   postgres backups and archive wal on NFS volume. Of  cause, NFS v.4 can be
>   configured to to work with text usernames, but our sysadmins are not smart
>   enough to do this. And without this there is a problem to work with NFS
>   with dynamically assigned random uids with several servers.

I don't really think that just working around insufficient sysadmin 
effort is a good enough justification for this, sorry.  We're very 
conservative about assigning static IDs and strongly prefer dynamic ones 
wherever possible.

PostgreSQL's WAL archival mechanisms are configurable enough that even 
if you can't get people to configure NFS properly it should still be 
possible to insert something to deal with transferring WAL segments 
around in a different way.

>   Аnd according to /usr/share/doc/base-passwd
>   64001 | mysql             | mysql-server
>
>   mysql already has reserved uid. PostgreSQL may have reserved uid in the
>   same manner.

The static "mysql" user and group IDs were assigned a long time ago and 
before my time (https://bugs.debian.org/28158).  The justification in 
that bug report would not be good enough today; there seems no reason it 
couldn't use dynamic IDs instead.

We in fact used to have static "postgres" IDs, but I removed those in 
2003 (https://bugs.debian.org/95557).

Regards,

-- 
Colin Watson (he/him)                              [cjwatson at debian.org]