Re: Why does Debian use a nonstandard chsh?

[Michael Stone <mstone@itri.loyola.edu>]

On Wed, Apr 14, 1999 at 06:30:46AM -0500, Jor-el wrote:
> 	Yes, this could be fixed via documentation. I think, however, that
> this is a short term approach. The real fix would be to make the Debian
> 'chsh' option compatible with the mainstream one. Why would you _want_ to
> maintain an incompatibility when it can be removed?

I think you're reading more into the significance of chsh than you
should. This is probably instead a mistake on the part of the kernel
docs, which say you need _util-linux_ > x, and use chsh to identify x.
I'd be surprised if the version of chsh really mattered--the program
that breaks under 2.2 is more likely something like mkswap, but since
mkswap doesn't have a --version option the docs recommend using chsh to
guess the util-linux version. 

So we could change our chsh to report a version number, but that number
would have no relation to the version of util-linux which is what the
Changes maintainer is getting at. The other option is to drop the chsh
from the shadow suite in favor of the one from util-linux, but it
doesn't seem logical that a program that modifies a field in the passwd
file should be seperate from the rest of the passwd utilities. The real
fix here would be for the rest of the utilities in util-linux to report
a version number, so that one of the more relevant packages could be
used as the litmus test. 

Mike Stone