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Date:      Mon, 26 Jan 2015 13:20:28 -0800
From:      Devin Teske <dteske@FreeBSD.org>
To:        Bruce Evans <brde@optusnet.com.au>
Cc:        Baptiste Daroussin <bapt@freebsd.org>, src-committers@freebsd.org, svn-src-all@freebsd.org, Slawa Olhovchenkov <slw@zxy.spb.ru>, svn-src-head@freebsd.org, Devin Teske <dteske@FreeBSD.org>
Subject:   Re: svn commit: r277652 - in head/usr.sbin/pw: . tests
Message-ID:  <5D58B34B-8647-4B69-8D90-E7D37C98D4AD@FreeBSD.org>
In-Reply-To: <20150126014336.P2572@besplex.bde.org>
References:  <201501241913.t0OJD4xT039188@svn.freebsd.org> <20150125155254.V1007@besplex.bde.org> <20150125142148.GA76051@zxy.spb.ru> <20150126014336.P2572@besplex.bde.org>

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> On Jan 25, 2015, at 7:31 AM, Bruce Evans <brde@optusnet.com.au> wrote:
> 
> On Sun, 25 Jan 2015, Slawa Olhovchenkov wrote:
> 
>> On Sun, Jan 25, 2015 at 04:56:24PM +1100, Bruce Evans wrote:
>> 
>>> Negative ids have historical abuses in places like mountd.

Which paves the way for the “accepted practice” argument
and backed up by “in-the-field usage” statement(s).



>>>  mountd still
>>> hard-codes -2 and -2 for the default uid and gid of an unprivileged user.
>>> It at least casts these values to uid_t and gid_t before using them.
>>> This gives the ids the non-random values of UINT32_MAX-1 if uid_t and
>>> gid_t are uint32_t.  (If uid_t and gid_t were signed, then it would
>>> leave the values as negative, so invalid.)  These magic values may work
>>> better than when ids were 16 bits, since there is less risk of them
>>> conflicting with a normal id.  However, the non-conflict is probably
>>> a bug.  FreeBSD uses the magic ids of 65534 for user nobody: group
>>> nobody.  These would have been (id_t)-2 with 16-bit ids.  They no
>>> longer match, so ls displays (id_t)-2 numerically.  FreeBSD also has
>>> a group nogroup = 65553 that doesn't match the nfs usage.  However2,
>>> in FreeBSD-1 wher ids were 16-bits, nobody was 32767 and nogroup was
>>> 32766. so they didn't match nfs for other reasons.  The 2 non-groups
>>> now seem to be just a bug -- FreeBSD-1 didn't have group nobody.
>>> 4.4BSD-Lite2 has the same values as FreeBSD-1.
>> 
>> This is not full true for ZFS case.
>> On ZFS nobody is 2^32-2.
> 
> File systems don't get to decide this.

+1 (and thanks for the historical account, bruce — sincerely)

However, I still want to make the argument that:

a. Because we’ve supported mapping negative inputs to unsigned values in pw *for over a decade*, that…

b. We should either revert or make a relnotes submission to note that we’re changing the long-standing accepted practice.

Changing the accepted practice broke code internally, it would have likely broken some external code as well — and people deserve to know about said change else we should continue to support accepted practice that is decade(s) old.
— 
Devin




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