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Re: Why do UID values of system users matter?

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On Mon 19 Aug 2019 at 09:17:21 (-0400), Greg Wooledge wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 16, 2019 at 11:03:48PM -0400, Kenneth Parker wrote:
> > >From looking at an Ubuntu 16.04 System I administer, User "man" (uid 6) is,
> > apparently the owner of /var/cache/man, which appears to be an area for
> > translating man pages.  Who creates this User?
> 
> I don't know about Ubuntu, because this is debian-user.  In Debian,
> the preinst script for the base-passwd package will create a bunch
> of system users if /etc/passwd is not present, and groups if /etc/group
> is not present.
> 
> See /var/lib/dpkg/info/base-passwd.preinst for details.
> 
> One might ponder under what conditions, exactly, this script would be
> executed while these files are not yet present.  I don't know the inner
> workings of the debian-installer, so I'm not sure whether this is just
> a safety net, or an expected part of a normal system installation.

base-passwd is the first package installed at "Install the base system"
which follows "Partition disks", so it would normally expect to be
installed into an empty partition. I should add, though, that it gets
re-unpacked, re-installed and set up a few seconds later, when about
a score of other packages have been set up. I would assume a preinst
script would run on the first occurrence.

What's odd to me is that the base-passwd preinst file has two Here
documents which duplicate its /usr/share/base-passwd/*master files.
Perhaps ok for files that only change on a time-scale of decades, but
I wonder why the /etc versions are not just copied from the masters.

Cheers,
David.

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Why do UID values of system users matter? Steffen Dettmer <steffen.dettmer@gmail.com> - 2019-08-16 23:30 +0200
  Re: Why do UID values of system users matter? Dan Hitt <dan.hitt@gmail.com> - 2019-08-17 00:20 +0200
  Re: Why do UID values of system users matter? Pascal Hambourg <pascal@plouf.fr.eu.org> - 2019-08-17 00:30 +0200
    Re: Why do UID values of system users matter? Steffen Dettmer <steffen.dettmer@gmail.com> - 2019-08-17 04:20 +0200
      Re: Why do UID values of system users matter? Kenneth Parker <sea7kenp@gmail.com> - 2019-08-17 05:10 +0200
        Re: Why do UID values of system users matter? Greg Wooledge <wooledg@eeg.ccf.org> - 2019-08-19 15:20 +0200
          Re: Why do UID values of system users matter? David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk> - 2019-08-19 20:00 +0200
      Re: Why do UID values of system users matter? David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk> - 2019-08-17 06:50 +0200
        Re: Why do UID values of system users matter? Greg Wooledge <wooledg@eeg.ccf.org> - 2019-08-19 15:30 +0200
          Re: Why do UID values of system users matter? David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk> - 2019-08-19 19:30 +0200
      Re: Why do UID values of system users matter? <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2019-08-17 10:20 +0200
  Re: Why do UID values of system users matter? David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk> - 2019-08-17 06:10 +0200

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