I have been wondering for quite some time now; where does Android store it's user and group id information?

As I understand it, each app that gets installed on Android gets it's own uid and gid and this is the bases of the "sandboxing" of apps that occurs on Android as they all run in their own process and can't access data of another process or files owned by another app unless there are declaration in a Manifest file created by app programmers which dictates what info is to be shared to other apps and what not. This is also how apps gain or rather request access to networking services during installation by requesting to be added to the INTERNET group or something like that, don't quote me on the name of the NET net group, it might be more like INET or INET6, either way I know there are several levels of network access that can be granted to an application through this mechanism on Android.

Also I need to inform Android about Postres and it's membership in the network group so that it can open sockets and allow access to databases. I have disabled PARANOID_NETWORKING in the kernel for the time being, but this hack only serves to make Android as Secure as vanilla Linux, no less. It would be nice to keep the paranoid setting and apply the group permissions to what daemons/users I see fit.

• I think I am going to need to create a custom PAM module and blend Bionic and Glibc into a single C library, they need to compatible with applications on both sides, no exceptions, expect C++ exceptions that is ;p--- I have written a couple rules of thumb-2 :) for myself to follow. I might also need to write a wrapper to popular package management systems like rpm and apt that fakes an apk installation and gives each new deb|rpm package a UID and maybe just sym-link everything into the FHS. That might be the most ideal solution I could go for, though the most work, as each would need a set of permissions in their "manifest", maybe a menu during install an the user can give and take as needs be.
• Does anyone have a good reference that explains the syntax of these files? I am not very well versed with XML, not to mention it's use usually depends on the application that interprets it.
• I do understand the packages.list file with the exception of the null entry in the last column, can anyone explain that?

I have been wondering for quite some time now; where does Android store its user and group id information?

As I understand it, each app that gets installed on Android gets its own uid and gid and this is the basis of the "sandboxing" of apps that occurs on Android as they all run in their own process and can't access data of another process or files owned by another app unless there are declaration in a Manifest file created by app programmers which dictates what info is to be shared to other apps and what not. This is also how apps gain or rather request access to networking services during installation by requesting to be added to the INTERNET group or something like that, don't quote me on the name of the NET net group, it might be more like INET or INET6, either way I know there are several levels of network access that can be granted to an application through this mechanism on Android.

Also I need to inform Android about Postgres and its membership in the network group so that it can open sockets and allow access to databases. I have disabled PARANOID_NETWORKING in the kernel for the time being, but this hack only serves to make Android as Secure as vanilla Linux, no less. It would be nice to keep the paranoid setting and apply the group permissions to what daemons/users I see fit.

• I think I am going to need to create a custom PAM module and blend Bionic and Glibc into a single C library, they need to compatible with applications on both sides, no exceptions, expect C++ exceptions that is ;p--- I have written a couple rules of thumb-2 :) for myself to follow. I might also need to write a wrapper to popular package management systems like rpm and apt that fakes an apk installation and gives each new deb|rpm package a UID and maybe just sym-link everything into the FHS. That might be the most ideal solution I could go for, though the most work, as each would need a set of permissions in their "manifest", maybe a menu during install an the user can give and take as needs be.
• Does anyone have a good reference that explains the syntax of these files? I am not very well versed with XML, not to mention its use usually depends on the application that interprets it.
• I do understand the packages.list file with the exception of the null entry in the last column, can anyone explain that?

Update: Have been doing more searches and This might be what I am looking for.

Update: Have been doing more searches and This might be what I am looking for.