Lots of people are playing with the new container runtime tools that run containers as non root, like Podman and Buildah. These tools take advantage of the /etc/subuid and /etc/subgid files provided by shadow-utils and updated via useradd for managing extra uids to be used by the user within containers. A lot of people using these tools want to be able to destribute the content in these files the same way they do for content in /etc/passwd. Basically they want to have nsswitch support for them.
Created attachment 1626792 [details] Proposal for adding subuid and subgid to nsswitch
I added the text, I attempted to update the Wiki, but it would not allow me to edit a new page.
(In reply to Daniel Walsh from comment #6) > I added the text, I attempted to update the Wiki, but it would not allow me > to edit a new page. I missed this comment. Are you talking about the glibc wiki? Please have a look at this: https://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/EditorGroup Your account will be deleted if you didn't get added to EditorGroup in a timely fashion, so you may need to recreate your account.
I've commented on this upstream again, summarizing the past comments and adding my own reflection on the design direction: https://github.com/shadow-maint/shadow/issues/154#issuecomment-571415244 Next week I'm going to close this issue as CLOSED/UPSTREAM, as something we can track upstream. RHEL would inherit a choice made and designed upstream. We would reopen a new bug to backport a solution from upstream (which may not be in glibc).