Reserving USERID

[Philip Prindeville]

Hi,

I'm working on an updated release of Clixon for OpenWRT, and I want it to stop running as "root".

Looking at all of the Makefiles, I see some packages reserve an explicit uid/gid associated with the user and group names, like ntp and ubus and network... while others don't (like docker and unbound).

Is explicit better or not?  And if it is better, how do I go about reserving values that won't get stepped on?  Who is our Numbers Czar, who is our IANA?

And if the packaging requires that files be owned by a certain user, how is that handled in the Makefiles?

Thanks,

-Philip