Re: Still testing needed: New passwd/group AD/SAM integration

[Corinna Vinschen <corinna-cygwin at cygwin dot com>]

On Apr 10 12:42, Warren Young wrote:
> On 4/10/2014 08:53, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> >* Support for Cygwin user names different from the Windows username.
> >
> >   This is a really fat problem.
> 
> Who needs this functionality?

I don't remember, but some user on this list wrote in February about how
he uses this for... something.  Something to do with logging in to other
machines or so.

> Is it some legacy of passwd(5) compatibility, such as the wish to
> have colons in Windows login names?

No, it's just some legacy of how we allow this for /etc/passwd and
/etc/group.  See, for instance entries like

  root:S-1-5-21-544:0:

to fake a root group backed by the administrators group.  It 
seemed like a good idea at the time (2000 or so) and this would
not be possible anymore.  But, in fact, I was trying to make sure
all the time that our applications don't rely on this.  And if we
actually have an application which relies on this, it's a bug.

> Does the move to AD/SAM eliminate the original need, so that you
> actually have *two* reasons to stop paying the runtime expense?

I never had this need.  To me it was just a funny extension.  But maybe
other users are using this, so I'm a bit unlucky now that I invented it
in the first place.


Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Maintainer                 cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat

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