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2014-06-12sysusers: add minimal tool to reconstruct /etc/passwd and /etc/group from ↵Lennart Poettering
static files systemd-sysusers is a tool to reconstruct /etc/passwd and /etc/group from static definition files that take a lot of inspiration from tmpfiles snippets. These snippets should carry information about system users only. To make sure it is not misused for normal users these snippets only allow configuring UID and gecos field for each user, but do not allow configuration of the home directory or shell, which is necessary for real login users. The purpose of this tool is to enable state-less systems that can populate /etc with the minimal files necessary, solely from static data in /usr. systemd-sysuser is additive only, and will never override existing users. This tool will create these files directly, and not via some user database abtsraction layer. This is appropriate as this tool is supposed to run really early at boot, and is only useful for creating system users, and system users cannot be stored in remote databases anyway. The tool is also useful to be invoked from RPM scriptlets, instead of useradd. This allows moving from imperative user descriptions in RPM to declarative descriptions. The UID/GID for a user/group to be created can either be chosen dynamic, or fixed, or be read from the owner of a file in the file system, in order to support reconstructing the correct IDs for files that shall be owned by them. This also adds a minimal user definition file, that should be sufficient for most basic systems. Distributions are expected to patch these files and augment the contents, for example with fixed UIDs for the users where that's necessary.