ports adding users

[Jonathan McKeown]

This is, I guess, a philosophical question.

Twice in the last couple of weeks I have been bitten by ports adding users or 
groups. In setting up my laptop, I created my user account in sysinstall 
without creating my group. My ~ was created with the GID corresponding to my 
UID, but in building KDE, comms/gnokii used pw groupadd and was allocated 
`my' GID, resulting in my ~ being group-owned by gnokii.

More seriously, we are moving our user accounts into LDAP and I now have a 
problem on a server where I installed net/isc-dhcp3-server before configuring 
pam_ldap and nss_ldap. As a result the dhcpd user (in /etc/passwd) and one of 
my user accounts (in LDAP) have the same UID and GID. Disentangling these is 
going to be... interesting.

After some digging about, I see I can effectively reserve a block of UIDs/GIDs 
by starting my UID numbering at (1001 + x), and creating /etc/pw.conf with

reuseuids yes
reusegids yes

to use the UIDs/GIDs between 1000 and (1000 + x) (otherwise pw just allocates 
a UID/GID higher than any in use, which puts it right back in my reserved 
range). Perhaps I should also set the maxuid/maxgid options too, just in 
case?

That's one option.

Another is to expect dozens of busy port maintainers to cover for me by 
reserving UIDs/GIDs instead of creating random users.

Another is to arrange somehow that the ports infrastructure provide a pw.conf 
which can be used when pw is called by ports, that limits the range of 
UIDs/GIDs that a port can be allocated so that it doesn't overlap with the 
range generally used for user accounts.

Thoughts?

Jonathan