[indiana-discuss] Default Shell

[Bill Sommerfeld]

On Fri, 2007-11-02 at 11:34 -0400, Dave Miner wrote:
> Nothing else related to a user account should be "annoying to change
> later"; if they are, IMHO that's a bug in the Administration tools,
> not the installer, and that's where we need to address things.

Unless you're proposing a radical rethinking of the unix
account/permissions model, an account's uid will always be extremely
annoying to change.  

Changing the field in /etc/passwd is easy but insufficient.

You also need to track down and change references to the uid in file
metadata and in backups, tarballs, packages, etc., where it might have
been picked up.  A local administrator probably won't have authority to
change the ownership or content of remote files.

It's not going to be possible for administrative tools to hunt down and
change every last reference to the uid in the local and remote
filesystems you may have touched while operating with the "wrong" uid.

(The specific use case I'm thinking of is a single-user laptop which is
sometimes an NFS client; I want a local account as the machine's owner,
and the local account needs the same uid as the one I use on some set of
NFS servers..)

					- Bill