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Date: Fri, 15 Nov 1996 20:17:59 -0700 (MST)
From: Marc Slemko <marcs@znep.com>
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To: dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu
cc: Gianmarco Giovannelli <gmarco@scotty.masternet.it>, questions@FreeBSD.org
Subject: Re: users & mail & group 
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On Thu, 14 Nov 1996, Doug White wrote:

> On Wed, 13 Nov 1996, Gianmarco Giovannelli wrote:
> 
> > 1) Why adduser add the user name in /etc/group even if it isn't mandatory ?
> > I explain better . If I create the user "gmarco" that belongs to group 2000
> > (user) adduser add gmarco to 2000 group in /etc/group even if 2000 is the
> > default group of gmarco. I always have to delete the username after the
> > group by hand. It begin to be annoying :-)
> 
> Adduser enforces a type of system administration where everyone has their
> own login group and you add people to other groups for permissions.  It
> solves problems with the 1024 character limit / line in /etc/group and
> makes some sysadmin tasks really easy.  Note that you can configure
> adduser to put the user in other groups, and if you got really annoyed
> with it you could vi /usr/bin/adduser and fix it. :)  adduser is a perl
                            ^^^sbin
> script BTW.

I think what Gianmarco is wondering about is not why each user has a
seperate group, but why each user is listed explicitly in /etc/groups.
Since their primary group is already the group with their username, there
is no need to have their name in /etc/group.  All that is needed is the
group entry with no user.  ie., now it looks like:
	marcs:*:1000:marcs

but it could look like:
	marcs:*:1000:

and still do the same thing.

AFAIK, it just does that because it wants to.  Helps make it a
little more explicit about what the groups are for I guess.