Bug#988499: systemd: New sgx group looks overly generic and prone to collision

[Guillem Jover]

On Fri, 2021-05-14 at 12:17:44 +0200, Guillem Jover wrote:
> Control: forwarded -1 https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/19610
> 
> On Fri, 2021-05-14 at 11:34:37 +0200, Michael Biebl wrote:
> > Am 14.05.21 um 11:17 schrieb Guillem Jover:
> > > The version in experimental introduced a new system group called sgx
> > > which has an overly generic name with the potential to collide with
> > > user and group names, say their initials. Could it be rename to use
> > > the system name convention of prefixing it with «_»?
> > 
> > I fear, that unfortunately this ship has sailed when it comes to naming
> > conventions. While I like the "_" prefix (e.g. much better then Debian-),
> > it's unfortunately not commonly used.
> > None of the groups defined in /usr/lib/sysusers.d/basic.conf use it.
> > "sgx" is supposed to be used in the same way as "audio", "video", "kmem",
> > "render" afaiu, none of those use the "_" prefix.
> 
> Right, I checked the other instances and they seemed somewhat more scoped
> than sgx. Even thought it would indeed be nice to use a consistent
> namespacing there, but…
> 
> > That said, you might try to raise this upstream.
> > I won't, I already had my share of confrontation on this issue, see
> > https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/18944
> > So I'm probably not the best person to bring this up again.
> 
> Hmm, ok, I've submitted a report upstream, but have no high hopes of
> that being accepted.

Ok, that was fast, upstream already closed this as wontfix… :(

> On Fri, 2021-05-14 at 11:40:12 +0200, Michael Biebl wrote:
> > Am 14.05.21 um 11:34 schrieb Michael Biebl:
> > > "sgx" is supposed to be used in the same way as "audio", "video",
> > > "kmem", "render" afaiu, none of those use the "_" prefix.
> > 
> > Personally, I don't see the nee for this "sgx" group, tbh, as it looks to be
> > very use case specific and will require explicit configuration anyway.
> > But if the point is, to provide a "well known" group that other, 3rd party
> > software can use, then renaming it kinda defeats the point and I'd rather
> > revert this upstream change then renaming the group.
> 
> In the Debian context either a renamed group or a removed group would
> do for me. But this would still be a problem with upstream, and might
> mean projects start to rely on this name given that systemd upstream
> defines it, and might end up hardcoding it anyway in their code. :/

Thanks,
Guillem