Numerical owners

Denis,

I have a request for a non-feature :). Please, never implement mapping
UIDs and GIDs to names. Rdiff-backup didn't use to do it, but it does
now. The author implemented an option to preserve numerical ids on my
request, but it's not default behaviour. Tar, rsync and rdiff-backup all
three map to names by default, but fall back to UID's when no name is
found.

But because it's very likely you'll be restoring a dar backup from a
livecd, which has different UIDs-to-names matches than the system you
backed up, it's very easy to mess up your entire system when
restoring/making a backup. If the "bin" user for example has a different
UID on the livecd, the files will have the wrong owner once you boot
into your restored system.

In my opinion, the backup should be as low-level as possible by default,
to avoid making a mistake by forgetting an option. As far as I know, dar
is the only backup program which is robust enough in that manner, and
thefore the best program to use for system backups. The irony is, that
it's not that well-known a backup tool als rdiff-backup, rsync and tar.
So, a lot of people will have incorrect backups, or accidently make a
mistake and forget the --numerical option upon restoration.

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