File owner name not updated.

[Kevin Stevens]

I had this problem several months ago, submitted a bug report on it, 
and promptly forgot about it.  I'm now seeing the same issue in 5.0, 
and want to delve a little deeper to see if this is expected behavior 
or not.

I created a user, let's call him fred, which was assigned uid 503.  The 
user directory was created and assigned to owner fred and group wheel.  
All ok.  Later that evening, root changed the uid for fred to 502 (for 
compatibility with other systems).  The problem isn't that the 
directory owner didn't automatically change to uid 502 - I expected to 
have to change it manually.  What I wasn't prepared for is that a ls 
-al still showed the owner as fred, which was now assigned to uid 502.  
ls -lan properly showed the owner as still being 503.

So, I'm open to correction, but it seems to me that something's broken. 
  If user fred used to be 503, but is now 502 (there is no user 503 
now), I don't see how it can be correct for ls to still report fred as 
the owner of files/directories.  I expected the reporting to change to 
just show the numeric uid, but I'm not picky about that.

I have no idea whether this is a problem with the ls command, with the 
filesystem, with some index of ownership/permissions, or something else 
entirely.  Suggestions?

KeS