is there a future for user accounting (getpw* replacement)

[Igor Mozolevsky]

On Mon, 17 Feb 2020 at 11:15, Anthony Pankov via freebsd-hackers
<freebsd-hackers at freebsd.org> wrote:
>
> Greetings,
>
> I'm   wondering  has  anybody  any  thoughts  about  user  accounting
> provided at the system level?
>
> It seems that getpw* doesn't suit the needs of application services.
> All  applications has some external/internal mechanism for storing and
> retrieving  user  properties  (settings,  roles etc). Furthermore they
> implement own security policy based on this mechanism.
>
> Mostly it is done via LDAP connection or internal store (as for database).
>
> It seems that all application developers will be more happy if OS will
> have a few functions to do the things such as:
> - list users of some type;
> - get user properties specific to application;
> - get  user roles specific to application
> -?
>
> Does   anybody   has   thoughts  about  what  OS  must provide to keep
> applications consistency and make developers happier?



I think it's dangerous to conflate *application* users with *system*
users, why would you want to do that in the first place?


-- 
Igor M.