[bitbake-devel] hashequiv, pseudo, and GIDs

[chris.laplante at agilent.com]

> > So why is the group name used in the hash, as opposed to the GID? (I also have the same question regarding user name vs UID). If
> the GID was used we wouldn't have this issue.
> 
> That was done in response to this mailing list thread:
> http://lists.openembedded.org/pipermail/openembedded-core/2019-January/277755.html
> 
> Basically, the GID and UID aren't stable values across builds so the
> suggestion was to use the names. My understanding was that this
> corresponded to how the user and groups are dealt with in general.

That doesn't make sense (intuitively) to me. If I have a file with owner GID 1000, and copy it to some system, then the group name is defined by whatever groups happen to exist on the system. If I copy it to a different system, the owner group name might be different, depending on /etc/group. In both cases, it is the GID of 1000 that is stable. 

From a caching point of view, it seems incorrect to care about what the corresponding group name happened to be at the time when the cache was created. 

Chris