Non-consistent naming for system user

[ldvc]

Hi there, while working on deploying otelcol, I figured out that dedicated user for running otelcol binary is not very consistent.

Installing the Debian package:

• otelcol => create user otel
• otelcol-contrib => create user otelcol-contrib

root@debian11:~# getent passwd | grep -i otel
otel:x:996:996::/home/otel:/sbin/nologin
otelcol-contrib:x:995:995::/home/otelcol-contrib:/sbin/nologin

Is there any historical reason for that? Why not using the same username for both distributions?

P.S. if needed I can try to work on a PR for normalizing this.

[jpkrohling]

I guess I'm guilty of this one. What I had in mind back then is that we could have two instances of the collector running on the same machine, each instance using a specific distribution. On that case, it could be useful to have each distribution to have its own user, but I can accept arguments that they should be the same.

I would have a different opinion about other distributions though: a third-party distribution should definitely specify its own user.