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Bug#1101196: installation-reports: Trixie Installer fails to create first user when full name contains non-ASCII characters and spaces



On 29/03/2025 at 21:13, Holger Wansing wrote:

I have tested an install with not selecting anything in tasksel (even
standard was unselected), and both adduser and useradd were installed
in this minimal setup.

adduser is installed by debootstrap as part of the base system.

So useradd seems to be mostly not in use (anymore).

Actually useradd is used as a back-end by adduser.

Anyway, it seems that adduser is the program, that's used when this error
occures, not useradd.

Right.

IIUC adduser's new sanitation regex for the 'comment' (ex-gecos) value)
is defined by:

    commentre => qr/["-_\.+!\$%&()\]\[;0-9a-zA-Z\/ ]*/

It looks like only ASCII characters are allowed.

Also, the regex matches the whole range from '"' to '_' (including ':' which is the field separator in /etc/passwd so should be prohibited). Is this intended or is it a mistake ?

Possible options may include:
- align adduser's comment sanitation regex on useradd
- make user-setup have the same restriction on the full name as adduser
(it currently does not seem to have any)

If above sanitation regex is new in adduser, then this choice looks to me
like the way to go.

I would be disappointed if Debian stopped allowing international characters in the full name without a good reason.


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