| > 1. Every package should care to create the accounts it needs.
| 
| The problem with this is IDs. If the account is already there, you
| can fit it into NetBSD's `standard' scheme for account IDs; if it's
| not, you either run the risk of overwriting an ID that someone's
| created, or end up creating a different UID number on every system,
| which makes life inconvenient, at best, in installations with
| multiple machines. How do you deal with a shared install of MySQL
| where it's on one central server shared via NFS, but the password
| files on all the machines are different, for example?

  But having some deactivated account in the distribution "just in
case" is not what I'd call a good solution.

  For one, it's inconsistent with all the other packages -- NetBSD
doesn't ship with a http, a squid, a backup, a you-name-it account,
just because someone somewhere might have a need for it.

  Synchronizing accounts or UIDs is a different problem altogether,
and that's what NIS or rdist or one of the gazillion other methods
of distributing user information are for.

  Perhaps the description of a package should mention that it will
create a new account if not already there, so one can create one
with whatever UID one likes before. Or perhaps the packages shouldn't
create accounts on their own at all (I'd prefer that variant, I was
quite upset when the amanda package created a 'backup' user), but
instead just complain that the account is not there, and one should
pretty please create it beforehand.

	mjl