Re: [Fink-devel] [Fink-users] Mountain Lion upgrade notes

[Alexander H. <ale...@gm...>]

On 7/27/12 12:43 PM, Dustin Cartwright wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 9:28 AM, Alexander Hansen
> <ale...@gm... <mailto:ale...@gm...>> wrote:
> 
>     On 7/27/12 4:55 AM, Martin Costabel wrote:
>     > What is the information on which Fink bases this "UIDs above 250 are
>     > free" policy?
>     >
> 
>     It comes down from the mists of time.  Maybe it was true at one point?
> 
>     Dustin Cartwright, who did a lot of the work on the code for user
>     addition/modification in fink, noted in a thread that this is indeed a
>     problem, and that UIDs in the 250-299 range were indeed subject to use
>     by Apple.  That's why fink-bld now defaults to the 600-699 range, which
>     is listed as "open" (at least currently)
> 
> 
> Apple does not seem to document its UID policies very transparently.
> When I looked the only semi-official policy I could find is that, at
> least as of 2011, UIDs less than 500 are reserved by Apple, and 500+ are
> for users and also for non-Apple daemon accounts:
> https://trac.macports.org/ticket/30168#comment:15 and
> https://trac.macports.org/ticket/30168#comment:29
> 
> I chose to start at 600 just to keep fink's daemon accounts numerically
> separate from the normal user accounts, which are assigned to free UIDs
> starting from 500. For comparison, Macports just looks for free UIDs
> starting from 500.
> 
> So that's the rationale for the fink-bld policy. For the UIDs in the
> passwd package, I have this vague recollection that in early versions of
> OS X, the login screen displayed all users with UID at least 500, so I'd
> speculate that 250-299 may have been chosen to keep fink's daemon users
> from showing up there.
> 
> Dustin

Yeah, that's probably why low numbers were picked.

But then the users initially wound up showing up on the login screen for
Lion, so we had to suppress that.

-- 
Alexander Hansen, Ph.D.
Fink User Liaison
My package updates: http://finkakh.wordpress.com/