Re: UID Registry

Bart Whiteley wrote:

> On Tuesday 10 June 2003 10:27 am, Matt Wilson wrote:
> 
>>On Tue, Jun 10, 2003 at 10:15:51AM -0600, Bart Whiteley wrote:
>>
>>>For example: Currently among the major distributions you can
>>>find users "apache", "httpd", "www", or "wwwrun".  All of
>>>them have different UIDs.  This makes it a challenge to
>>>develop applications intended to run on multiple distributions.
>>
>>Why?  There are system interfaces for mapping the username to the uid,
>>there is no reason to hard-coded.
> 
> 
> But the names themselves aren't even the same. 
> 
> 

Any application being written should not rely on a particular name being
used.  Even if the distros were to standardise on a certain name, there
is nothing to stop a user/administrator compiling there own version to
use a different name.  Apache (and most other servers, give an option to
change the username they run as during the ./configure process).

Would it not be better for you to provide an option in your program
either as a compile time option or in its configuration script to
specify what user it runs as or expects another program to be running as?

Regards

Lee