Re: Bits from the release team: the plans for etch
On Tue, 25 Oct 2005 22:21:18 +0200, Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña
<jfs@computer.org> wrote:
>? Have you looked at the code I added to the developer's reference _at_all_?
Yes. Have you read adduser docs _at_all_?
>Creating system users needs to cope with the fact that users might have
>greated them before hand.
adduser copes with that. If a system user to be created does already
exist with the required properties, adduser is a no-op and exists with
a zero exit code. If a system user to be created does already exist
with different attributes, it exists with non-zero exit code, as this
is an error.
Thus, in most cases, a single call to adduser is all that's needed to
create a system user in postinst.
Your code, otoh, will overwrite local configuration which is an RC
bug.
> There's some code that needs to be written to cope
>with different packaging situations that adduser is unable to
>contemplate by itself.
Which situations?
>Not including the fact that the user created by a
>package might need to be removed on postinst.
Removing system users on package purge is widely regarded a bug since
one cannot guarantee that the local admin hasn't used the account for
other things as well. Additionally, removing the system user on
package purge might leave orphaned files around. If the maintainer
decides to remove a user in postinst, that can be done with an
explicit deluser call.
Frankly, I do not see any advantage in your dh_user idea.
Greetings
Marc
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