Re: Guidance on solving the username namespacing problem
>>>>> "Philipp" == Philipp Kern <pkern@debian.org> writes:
Philipp> I tried to raise this issue in [2] a year ago, but I think I don't know
Philipp> how to even start drafting a policy snippet about this. Would it be
Philipp> sufficient to just mandate "In order to avoid collisions with accounts
Philipp> created by the system administrator, usernames created by packages
Philipp> should start with an underscore." (assuming we could get a rough
Philipp> consensus for something like that) in 9.2.1 for now? Or is this
Philipp> effectively infeasible until we come up with a good migration story?
I think you could certainly do usernames created by packages are
encouraged to start with an underscore.
Encouraged being the new normative word meaning that maintainers ought
to do x unless they have a reason (like an existing username) to do
something else.
You could also do something more complex like
When maintainers choose a new hard-coded or dynamically generated username
for packages to use, they should start this username with an underscore.
Intent there is to capture making it a bug to do something else for new
usernames without making requirements for existing names.
Note that in cases like debconf, I don't think we want an underscore
prepended to what the user chooses, although I think defaulting to
something with a leading underscore would be fine.
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