whenever I reinstall
Feature changed by: Andreas Jaeger (a_jaeger) Feature #305724, revision 13 Title: Allow to take over old users by home directory openSUSE-11.2: Rejected by Christoph Thiel (cthiel1) reject date: 2009-07-16 18:03:58 reject reason: out of resources for 11.2. Priority Requester: Neutral Projectmanager: Desirable - openSUSE-11.3: New + openSUSE-11.3: Evaluation Priority Requester: Neutral Requested by: Jiří Suchomel (jsuchome) Description: (from bug reporter:) I have a seperate /home partition and whenever I reinstall/upgrade I just set up the same user as before and he gets assigned the same uid (1000) so nothing gets broken. But I guess with more users and corresponding home directories this aproach begs for wrong permissions, so I suggest the following: In case /home isn't empty it could take all directories available and list them as users to specify their data (Name, login, passwort etc as usual) and then assign corresponding uid. References: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=464238 Discussion: #1: Jan Engelhardt (jengelh) (2009-08-06 14:31:24) - Hm, that's something we used to do in the Windows days only... - That said, import-from-homedirs needs to be done carefully (read: an opt-in option), as one may very well want to use an LDAP server instead later in the system configuration. #2: Robert Davies (robopensuse) (2009-11-30 22:30:16) Why can't the passwd(5) and group(5) be saved as part of the install into the new /var, and undefined UID & GIDs then be offered? If the disk was wiped, simply copying backup of old file should suffice to prime this optional feature. There's more orginal info, than just the $USER, UID, GID info present from naively scanning /home. #3: Matthew Ayres (solar_granulation) (2010-02-16 23:54:58) If this can be achieved securely, reliably and without creating a burden then I would very much like to see it. However I can see problems arising from various configuration files from a previous installation hanging around and fouling up the operation of a newly installed system by refering to files not found in a restructured system directory. -- openSUSE Feature: https://features.opensuse.org/305724