Arch Linux

accountsservice has a "feature" enabled by default which is commented in the codebase as "only do heuristics on the range 500-1000 to catch one off migration problems in Fedora".

In the ordinary course of events, any account with a UID < UID_MIN (as defined in /etc/login.defs) is considered to be a system account and not a "human" account and is thus ignored by accountsservice.

This setting causes additional system users in the hardcoded range UID_MAX > UID > 500 to be considered as human users instead, based on extremely inaccurate heuristics. The intent would seem to be, deal with the following Fedora-specific policy that raised UID_MIN from 500 to 1000: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/1000SystemAccounts

We clearly don't need Fedora-specific code running on Arch Linux. Checking the shadow package's revision history, we've set UID_MIN to 1000 since at least 2008, when we initially imported all PKGBUILDs into svn...


As a result, accountsservice-enabled applications on Arch Linux will occasionally consider system accounts (this happens for the "git" user which has a login shell -- /usr/bin/git-shell) to be offered in, for example, the Gnome users/groups management dialogue, with accompanying offers to delete these users as well as their home directory. The home directory of system users is of course "/" and accountsservice will happily delete your entire operating system without telling you what the home directory in question is.

See:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=241134
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1812764#p1812764