cvs commit: src/etc group master.passwd

[Garance A Drosihn]

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.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu