[Mageia-discuss] Automatic selection of uid and gid at installation

[Michael Scherer]

 On Sat, 19 Feb 2011 21:16:49 +0100, Juergen Harms wrote:
> I realised that Mageia (like Mandriva) creates uids and gids starting
> at 500. Many other distros use 1000 - if you have multiple boot 
> system
> with other linux distros, that means that you need to manually 
> specify
> user ids if you want to access data shared between the system
> partitions.

 So far, fedora start at 500, mandriva start at 500, centos/rhel too.

 debian/ubuntu start at 1000, gentoo start at 1000,

 arch at 1001.

 Os x start at 501.

 I am not sure for opensuse, but I think they also start at 500.
 ( to be checked ).

 So if we switch to 1000, people will just complain that we broke
 compatibility with the other half of distributions, and this will not 
 help people
 using some system like arch or os x.

> How about adding a radio button in the initial User Management Screen
> (the one where you also provide the root login) which allows you to
> define whether you want uids and gids automatically created to start
> at 500 or 1000? That would make life (a little bit) easier for a more
> and more current situation.

 I would be against, most people installing a distribution will not
 have the slight idea of what this will be about. We could try to add 
 something
 that do auto detection of an other distribution and act accordingly ( 
 like
 "do you want use to reuse users and system setting of the current 
 distribution" ),
 but that's more complex.
 But I think this would be better for user that switch distros
 ( and for those that use more than 2, they will have to do by hand, we 
 should
 not add layer and layer of complexity to handle every possible case ).

-- 
 Michael Scherer