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YellowJacket GNU/Linux User and Group Notes

The Linux Standards Base (apparently now defunct) was a good concept but had some bad results, such as specifyung RPM as a package manager.

That being said, much of what it did produce can be seen as ‘good practices’ that distributions should adhere to unless there is a reason not to (e.g. no distribution should be compelled to support installation of third-party packages via RPM when plain old tar has been used for that in Un-x for decades).

With respect users and groups, the LSB did not have much to say, although it did suggest that UID/GID range 0--99 should be for statically allocated users and groups with UID/GID range 100--499 reserved for dynamic allocation by the system, basically suggesting the following in /etc/login.defs:

SYS_UID_MIN               100
SYS_UID_MAX               499

Note that is a recommondation and not an LSB requirement.

YJL is actually using the 0--299 and the 400--499 range for ‘statically allocated’, broken up into four sub-groups:

  1. 0--179
    Majority of common system users and groups excluding SystemD users.
  2. 180--199
    SystemD users and groups.
  3. 200--299
    Special Interest Group integration.
  4. 400--499
    YJL Specific users and groups that are less likely to be found on other GNU/Linux systems (like texlive:texlive at 450:450)

YJL is actually using the 300--399 and the 500--999 range for ‘dynamically allocated’, broken up into two sub-groups:

  1. 300--399
    Used for users and groups for which static allocation fails because the system (for whatever unforseen reason) has already allocated the preferred static UID/GID to something else.
  2. 500--999
    Used by groupadd -s dynamic allocation by the system.

Thus in the YJL /etc/login.defs:

SYS_UID_MIN               500
SYS_UID_MAX               999

Special Interest Group Integration

One of the goals of YJL is to allow for special interest groups to form that have their own package repositories outside the scope of YJL. Such package repositories may have the need for system users and groups.

For example, a Citizen Science SIG may want to package a daemon that allows home weather station data to be shared, or an Educational Software SIG may need a daemon for retrieval of education content from a central server.

In such cases, dynamic allocation of users and groups work just fine but static assignment may be preferable especially if the user ever has to reinstall the operating system but with preserved data.

Even if the packages are not part of YJL itself, allowing the assigment of the UID/GID in the yjl-sysusers.json file is in my opinion a reasonable thing to do.

YJL Specific Users and Groups

YJL itself will have users and groups that are not necessarily ‘generic’ across GNU/Linux distributions.

For example, despite TeXLive itself being fairly ubiquitous across GNU/Linux distributions, most distributions package it instead of using the OS agnostic packaging.

YJL prefers the OS agnostic packaging but to make the install available to many users, it then needs a specific user and group that is used for keeping the install up-to-date.

I am also toying with the idea of home LAN backup software that does not have the complexity of enterprise backup software. That also will likely want its own user and group.