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

On 2024-01-04 at 14:28, Simon McVittie wrote:
> 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.

Ah, I stand corrected, thanks.  That makes more sense than simply no one
in Arch noticing a problem.

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

Yes, I'm familiar with regular old base-passwd, which predates systemd
and helps keep Debian compatible with other init/service systems.

Debian's wesnoth-* package also doesn't actually use upstream's systemd
files.  So I'll update the package's systemd service and tmpfiles
configurations and add adduser and deluser to postinst and postrm.