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Message-ID: <3E67B21F.E3D77B7A@ieee.org>
Date: Thu, 06 Mar 2003 15:39:59 -0500
From: "Pierre A. Humblet" <Pierre DOT Humblet AT ieee DOT org>
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To: cygwin-developers AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: uid > 64k
References: <3E675F8D DOT 414B9BBD AT ieee DOT org> <20030306164822 DOT GT1193 AT cygbert DOT vinschen DOT de> <3E6780A9 DOT F1F32899 AT ieee DOT org> <20030306171033 DOT GB7674 AT redhat DOT com> <3E678A49 DOT 707BF9D0 AT ieee DOT org> <20030306200541 DOT GB10932 AT redhat DOT com>
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Christopher Faylor wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Mar 06, 2003 at 12:50:01PM -0500, Pierre A. Humblet wrote:
> >Christopher Faylor wrote:
> >
> >> Couldn't you just keep track of the uids and ensure that you didn't
> >> duplicate any?
> >
> >Yes, absolutely.
> >However there is no guarantee that users won't call separately mkpasswd -l
> >and mkpasswd -d, or another mkpasswd -d other_domain, or mkpasswd -d -u
> >It would be desirable to return the same uid in all these cases.
> 
> But why not just record whatever is already in /etc/passwd?  Subsequent calls
> are just going to be appending to it, right?
> 
Right. It's quite doable. However making it work flawlessly is a significant job
that will soon be obsolete within a few months.
I can whip a 5 line patch to mkpasswd that will work almost all the time,
(I would bet we will never see a complaint) and avoid the worst kind of aliasing 
that can occur today. For example adding 10000 to domain users can wrap around to
18 or 544, or to a local user. It just doesn't seem to happen.

Pierre