Subject: bug#45571: Support stable uids and gids for all accounts

From: Danny Milosavljevic <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 2 Jan 2021 02:30:20 +0100

Hi Leo,

On Fri, 01 Jan 2021 19:44:12 +0100
Leo Prikler <[email-masked]> wrote:

> Ah, that puts things into perspective.  In other words, the problem is
> not, that Guix doesn't read /etc/passwd at all, but that it reads the
> wrong one (the host instead of the guest, so to speak).  Should this
> perhaps be a parameter instead?  

Considering the goal of Guix, it's weird that with Guix, one needs to
store&restore /etc/passwd at all.  It's state, but not very useful one.
I mean that's how it is right now--but it's still weird.

With /etc/shadow maybe there's a slightly better case, but note that the key
to find stuff in /etc/shadow can't be the uid--the uid isn't even in there!

> How is that explicit?  The % even implies, that it's considered
> internal to the definition.  

Explicit means that the user-account record is initialized right there (every
time account-service-type is extended), by a literal.

And it is.  You can see it plain as day in the guix git repo where
account-service-type is used in gnu/services/ .

Implicit would be if some code would generate this <user-account> record
on-the-fly, usually leaving stuff hard to change by the maintainer.

'(user-account (name "x") ...)' is about as explicit as it gets for a record.

The "%" in the name of the binding changes nothing in the literal value.

And it indeed is possible to add (uid 4711) in the literal and it will work
just fine.

>  Instead, you'd have (darkstat-accounts
> config), which default to the current value of %darkstat-accounts, but
> are configurable at least in the way that they allow you to set their
> ids.  

Oh, you want internal service users to be USER-configurable.  Indeed that is
also what Jason suggested in the initial mail.

But I think that that would put undue burden on each user and is really just
a workaround.
I would really like to caution against us doing a "whack a mole" development
approach, where workarounds like that are introduced to work around bugs
without understanding the underlying causes.  So I disagree that having
internal service users be user-configurable is a good idea.

> In the realm of Guix system, this could be resolved by allowing the
> user to choose the "seeds" for those files, so to speak (in commands
> such as init, vm, deploy, etc.), could it not?  

Sure, but that's a last resort.  Better is to eliminate state if possible.

> Especially for (3), carrying over the old shadow from the guest rather
> than generating a new one with initial passwords sounds like it'd be a
> necessary precondition for using them with persistent storage.  

It depends on what it is used for, really.

> > (5) Also for not having this bug with containers, it would still be
> > better to
> > just make uid and gid mandatory for "user-account" records.
> > 
> > (6) Since (5) would move the burden to the user, it would be better
> > usability
> > to generate uid and gid in a deterministic manner as a default.    

> Is the current logic non-deterministic in any way other than supporting
> the reuse of old entries (which you yourself agree is a good thing)?  

It generates uids using a counter, so it depends on what order
user-accounts are created in by Guix, which depends on the order the user
specifies services in /etc/config.scm and on the order to user accounts
are specified in gnu/services/ by guix maintainers.  Then the service
executable (potentially) goes on to create files using those uids.

That means that if you remove or reorder service references in /etc/config.scm,
the uids "want" to change.  The only reason they don't change is because the
logic prefers the existing /etc/passwd's uids--a stopgap measure at the last
second to prevent total chaos.

Does any of this sound good to you?

I mean, strictly speaking, it's better than the alternative--but that's a low
bar.

Better would be a making the uid field mandatory and/or generating each uid
from the respective name.

> As far as I understand it, same config.scm + same
> /etc/{passwd,group,shadow} => same /etc/{passwd,group,shadow}.  

That is the intention of (gnu system shadow), I think.  I can't say whether
that's the case in practice now or not.  It certainly was not the case a few
years ago where I did run into the same problem (a necessary condition for
the problem to manifest is that the services change--but my /etc/config.scm
services forms have been stable for a long time now, and Guix upstream also
doesn't change service definitions a lot anymore.  So who knows?).

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