Re: Testers needed: New passwd/group handling in Cygwin

[Warren Young <warren at etr-usa dot com>]

On 2/13/2014 07:38, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> The new
> mechanism will never read the entire file into memory, but only scan
> for the requested entry and cache this one in memory[2].

Does this feature avoid the stale cache problem?

For instance, do you check the mtime on /etc/{passwd,group} before 
checking the cache, then dump the whole cache if the file was changed 
since the last file scan?

>    Apart from power shell scripting or inventing new CLI tools, these
>    attributes can be changed using the "Attribute Editor" tab in the user
>    properties dialog of the "Active Directory Users and Computers"
>    MMC snap-in.

A week ago, we were talking about possible Cygwin {user,group}{add,mod} 
programs, modeled on Linux's.  Was that simply shelved once "net user" 
and MMC were found to be sufficient?

If such programs existed, they could abstract away the difference 
between /etc/passwd, SAM and AD.  Plus, net.exe is a hairball.

If, magically, such programs were to appear from outside the Cygwin core 
dev group, would that be a good thing or a bad thing?

>     unix="value"      Sets the NFS/Samba uid of the user to the decimal
>                       value.  See the next chapter.

I know I'm bikeshedding, but "unix" seems like a pretty vague attribute 
name here.

    unix="good" ?
    unix="linux" ?
    unix="yesplease" ?

I'd be happier with "uid" or similar.

Write it in a sentence:

a. My uid is 502; vs
b. My unix is 502.

>           If you create or change /etc/nsswitch.conf,
>           make sure to stop and restart all Cygwin processes to pick up
>           the change.

"All" processes?

If I have cron running, then exit the one instance of MinTTY after 
vim'ing /etc/nsswitch.conf, will the file be read when I re-open MinTTY?

cron.exe is running in a different process group, isn't it?

If true, I realize cron.exe and any programs it runs will continue to 
believe there is no /etc/nsswitch.conf until *it* restarts.

> the order [in nsswitch.conf] will be ignored by Cygwin.

Hmmm...different from Linux.

The inability to say "db files" as distinct from "files db" means you 
can't set up a SAM-only machine with SAM as a fast primary source of 
truth and "files" as a fallback.

That seems like a sensible configuration to me, since SAM should always 
be more trustworthy than /etc/passwd.

Personally, I'm going to try to get away with "db" only, but for systems 
that really require "files", I'd like the choice to make it secondary to 
"db".

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