Why does portage lock acct-user ebuilds on unmerge

[justin025]

I was just wondering why it makes more sense to lock an unused user instead of deleting it; for example qemu creates a user but after qemu is uninstalled the user is retained. Is there a specific reason why it was implemented this way and will I do any damage to my system by deleting extra accounts?

[dmpogo]

[Hu]

Removing a user account does not automatically remove all files owned by that account. If such files did exist, and the account were removed, a future user creation could accidentally assign that uid to some other name, with confusing or even security-sensitive consequences. By retaining the account, but locking it, future user creations are prevented from picking that uid unless explicitly forced to reuse an in-use uid.

[justin025]

Thanks for the explanation