Re: Policy on Account creation and deletion?

[Roland Bauerschmidt <rb@debian.org>]

Marc Haber wrote:
> I am wondering what a package should do if the account already exists:
>    * use this account verbatim?
>      This might be undesireable as the account might be in use for
>      something else.

As somebody else already pointed out, I think that the account should be
used as is if its UID is in the system user range. Adduser also supports
this. Consider the following example:

euler:~# adduser foobar
[...]
euler:~# adduser --system foobar
adduser: The user `foobar' already exists.
euler:~# echo $?
1
euler:~#

If the user foobar was created with --system before, the second call
wouldn't have failed:

euler:~# adduser --system foobar
Adding system user foobar...
Adding new user foobar (105) with group nogroup.
Creating home directory /home/foobar.
euler:~# adduser --system foobar
User foobar does already exist. Exiting...
euler:~# echo $?
0
euler:~#

I hope this helps, Roland