Re: creating system user IDs for system-wide daemons (was: wesnoth)

On Thu, 04 Jan 2024 at 08:22:53 -0500, P. J. McDermott wrote:
> Although interestingly, upstream uses [3] nobody:users, and
> Arch installs [4] upstream's service file without changing that, but
> they don't have a nobody user.

The 'root' and 'nobody' (or sometimes 'nfsnobody') users are sufficiently
fundamental that systemd ships a sysusers.d/basic.conf that will create
them automatically, so Arch doesn't need to do this in a distro-specific
way. If installed and enabled (which Arch might do by default),
libnss-systemd is also hard-coded to behave as though those two users
exist, even if they are not in any configuration file.

Debian doesn't actually use systemd's sysusers.d/basic.conf, and instead
we have our own somewhat larger version generated from base-passwd.

    smcv