cvs commit: src/etc group master.passwd

[Scott Long]

Garance A Drosihn wrote:
> At 6:34 PM +0200 6/9/05, Dag-Erling Smørgrav wrote:
> 
>> Garance A Drosihn <drosih at rpi.edu> writes:
>>
>>>  What do we care if the first letter is an underscore?  What is so
>>>  frightening about '_' that we *must* not use it?  This seems like a
>>>  reasonable convention to me, whether or not we happened to start it.
>>
>>
>> I don't mind conventions, even foreign ones.  What I mind is mixing
>> them.  If we want to adopt this convention, then we should adopt it
>> consistently, and add leading underscores to all our system accounts.
> 
> 
> Hmm.  Actually after re-reading my message (the part that you quoted
> above), I wanted to add that I did *not* mean to imply that we should
> change all our other accounts to match this convention, even though
> my message does sound like I meant that.
> 
> I just meant that "_" should be seen just like any other letter.  If
> the openbsd folks used the convention of having an 'o' as the first
> letter of every account they added, then we would just import their
> packages and use the same o-based account that they originally picked.
> We would neither care that it began with an 'o', nor would we change
> all our own historical userids to start them with an 'o'.  My position
> is that we should treat '_' no different than any other valid letter.
> 
> I don't see much to be gained by changing our other accounts to *add*
> the '_', since our users are already used to us shipping with those
> other account names.  There may be many scripts or other processes
> which already have those userids/group-names embedded in them.  I
> don't object to the idea if others are for it, but I don't see that
> it is worth the trouble either.
> 

I agree.  Changing the existing accounts simply for the sake of changing
does no favors for our users, and only makes upgrades harder.  We are in
the delicate situation of having enough of a userbase that making
changes should be well thought-out and well planned, even if not
changing hurts our sensibilities for consistency.

Scott