[Bug 961] New: Standard lacks guidelines for group ID ranges

Section 30.3 of the Linux Standard Base Core Specification 3.0RC2 recommends:

  "The system User IDs from 0 to 99 should be statically allocated by the
system, and shall not be created by applications. The system User IDs from 100
to 499 should be reserved for dynamic allocation by system administrators and
post install scripts using useradd."

Why is there no equivalent recommendation for group IDs? Guidance in this area
would be entirely equally useful for *both* UIDs and GUIs.

I believe, it would only be consistent to provide the same guidelines for both
user ID and group ID ranges.

This area is a nasty problem in heterogeneous environments, where computers that
use different Linux distributions share a common file space.

It would be useful to have standardized UID *and* GID ranges for

  - static users and group identifiers preloaded by a core distribution

  - users and group identifiers allocated dynamically on demand for individual
applications (e.g., by post-installation scripts), if they are not already available

  - per-user UIDs and GIDs

  - organization-specific user and group identifiers (e.g., representing roles
and working groups not associated with individual people)

It would also be useful to have in the standard the following recommendations:

  - For each individual personal user name, an identical individual personal
group name should be defined, and the two should have the same numerical
identifier. (Rationale: This is already common practice and helps enormously to
allow users to use umask 0002 by default.)

  - Linux distributions should provide in their installation mechanisms a
facility for providing a name<->integer mapping for UIDs and GIDs *before* the
first file is installed on a system. (Rationale: This allows system
administrators to ensure that the same /etc/passwd and /etc/group files are used
in heterogeneous environments involving different Linux distributions, even for
the distribution-specific static identifiers in the 0-99 range.)   
 
--    
Configure bugmail: http://bugs.linuxbase.org/userprefs.cgi?tab=email   
------- You are receiving this mail because: -------
You are the assignee for the bug, or are watching the assignee.