Re: DSelect/base-passwd

[Viktor Pavlenko <vp@example.com>]

>>>>> On Tue, 14 Nov 2000 17:09:29 +0900 (JST), "Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com> said:

    Darren> In particular it wanted to upgrade base-passwd (see
    Darren> below), but then said it wants to change the home
    Darren> directory of postgres. But postgres is installed from
    Darren> source not .deb, and is under /usr/local/, so why is it
    Darren> intefering? In fact why had it created a postgres user
    Darren> before I'd even installed postgres? Is changing postgres
    Darren> to a 100+ uid the proper way to solve this?

    SJT> postgres is a system user.  It has special privileges.
    SJT> Conventionally, such users are given "small" UIDs.  The
    SJT> problem is that often the UID is hardcoded into the package
    SJT> in some way.  If two packages expect to use the same UID, you
    SJT> have a problem.  So Debian keeps a list of them, and sets
    SJT> them up in a convenient way so that they won't conflict.
    SJT> Basically the same way that telnet is always port 23, smtp
    SJT> port 25, and http port 80 (although UID assignment is
    SJT> normally not as necessary as with the "well-known ports" for
    SJT> network services).

If postgreSQL itself doesn't enforce a particular uid for postgres
user, why a pkg management program should do that?..

And is it worth learning how to use this program if you have to know
and remember much more than you would have to if you just compiled the
sources yourself? And also one day you will have to upgrade your
package manager!

Once I appreciated that rpm had an option to list all files in the
package so that I could go and manually delete those of them that
_were_ installed by rpm -i (rpm -e wouldn't run of course).

No intention to start a fight over it, just my opinion :)

Viktor