probably not a huge deal, but bigger implications [LWN.net]

probably not a huge deal, but bigger implications

Posted Jun 24, 2025 14:20 UTC (Tue) by rjones (guest, #159862)
In reply to: probably not a huge deal, but bigger implications by joib
Parent article: GNOME deepens systemd dependencies

I've always just used 'getent' to look up users and groups.

This leverages nss and thus works regardless of what service is sourcing the id numbers for these things. This includes the systemd dynamic uids, which is also exposed via nss with the nss-systemd module.

Cat your /etc/nsswitch.conf to confirm. You should see 'systemd' listed there after files, etc

I don't think there is anything special that applications need to do to support anything at this point. Even if /etc/passwd was to magically disappear.

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probably not a huge deal, but bigger implications

Posted Jun 24, 2025 14:53 UTC (Tue) by joib (subscriber, #8541) [Link] (1 responses)

NSS, despite its architectural shortcomings, roughly does what it was designed for, and support for it is indeed near universal, from things like getent to the various user/group querying APIs in libc that applications use to look up info.

Problem here seems to be a desire to associate additional info to a user, not possible in the NSS data model. Like a picture of the user, email address, fully qualified username (name@DOMAIN), etc. Sssd having a go at this failed, remains to be seen whether the systemd approach will turn out to be more successful.

probably not a huge deal, but bigger implications

Posted Jun 25, 2025 11:07 UTC (Wed) by rjones (guest, #159862) [Link]

Oh, well that make sense.

Took a quick look at JSON Group Record and JSON User record from Systemd's documentation it all seems very reasonable and not any different then what people have already been doing for decades with LDAP.

It would be nice to have a nice way for users to set their picture, email address, timezone, default language, security keys, etc. in a saner manner. None of that seems crazy or undesirable.

And since systemd-userdb provides support for multiple backends then it can provide a unified interface for retrieving and interacting with LDAP and other sources of user information people already use and rely on while systemd-homed provides feature parity for people not using any of those services.

If it all works out then it should represent a nice improvement and simplification of the OS over the status quo.