On Mon, Jul 18, 2016 at 10:18:49AM -0400, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
I'd like to start a discussion regarding the "nobody" user on Fedora, and propose that we change its definition sooner or later. I am not proposing a feature according to the feature process for this yet, but my hope is that these discussions will lead to one eventually.
I am not against this proposal. It has been tried at least once before in the past but those failed due to a lot of programs secretly relying on the seperate uids and not a lot of people being able to fix it.
I am not 100% certain that it was mostly 99 due to issues with various network authentication systems from long ago. (ypbind/ldap/etc) where
I remember when this came up before but can't find it now. I think it was changed to 99 when UIDs went to 32 bit and it suddenly started being 65535 on some systems and 4294967295 on others. * I was trying to figure out why 99 was eventually chosen, but can't find it now.
In any case, the regularization makes sense to me.
* At $formeruniversity, we had someone who was trying to back up /var/log without any special handling for sparse files and they suddenly got very surprised and upset when lastlog became "gigantic". Ah, good times.