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Fedora 16 Will Number UIDs From 1000
dotancohen writes "Sharing users between Fedora and Debian-based distros just got a little easier. Beginning with Fedora 16, the Red-Hat based distro will number its human user UIDs starting from 1000, as opposed to the old 500. Though this change is intended to facilitate interoperability with other distros, it risks breaking backward compatibility with older Fedora releases including the newly released Fedora 15."
time_t is fixed for 64-bit systems. And for the 32-bit systems, well, we still have until 2038 to fix that problem.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
I'm perfectly fine with them changing the default... but MAKE IT CONFIGURABLE! It'd just have to be one file in /etc, so one could easily jack with it for migrations. How difficult is that?!? Who knows, maybe it already exists and I just couldn't find it?
You mean like /etc/login.defs?
If you're talking about an upgrade, then no. Change the UIDs and all of the files that were owned by the previous UIDs are now orphans.
Nonetheless, this still seems utterly unimportant.
Well, actually, that's not exactly true.
I've been thru this with other distros in the past, and in-place upgrades are never really a problem as you mention,
because the same users/groups are retained. Therefore no files become orphans.
New users just start higher when they are added. You can also make a simple setting to continue using 500 as the first user
if you want, you are not forced to start at 1000.
Moving data to a new server is where it gets messy, to say nothing about NFS coordination.
In our case, being a small size installations we opted to simply build a "find and chown" script to be run once, rather than
continuing with the legacy numbering.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.