Re: Help with fetchmail bug #268228
On Sun, Aug 29, 2004 at 09:12:59PM -0500, Graham Wilson wrote:
> Upon upgrading from multi-package version of fetchmail to the
> latest version, fetchmail-common is removed from the system, and removes
> the fetchmail user as well. This leaves the newest fetchmail package
> without a user to run as.
You should simply not remove users. You cannot possibly know whether
your package, or the system administrator has made any files owned by
that user. I could imagine a system administrator making a directory for
fetchmail, with fetchmail owned files in it. By removing the user, you
'orphan' those files, they don't have a symbolic user anymore, and
worse, when the next system user is added to the system, that user will
suddenly own those files that were not meant for him. You cannot just
remove all those files, or chown them, if only because at upgrade time
for example the NFS partition with those files is possibly unmounted.
I'm not really backed up by policy on this one, I think this should be
in there, for reasons I stated above.
> What is the best way to fix this? This only way I can think of (as was
> suggested in #268228) is to check in the init script whether the user
> exists, and, if not, to create it.
This should probably be done anyway, too.
--Jeroen
--
Jeroen van Wolffelaar
Jeroen@wolffelaar.nl (also for Jabber & MSN; ICQ: 33944357)
http://Jeroen.A-Eskwadraat.nl
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