On Wed, Oct 26, 2005 at 08:20:02AM -0400, sean finney wrote: > On Wed, Oct 26, 2005 at 02:15:41PM +0200, Gabor Gombas wrote: > > If a package's postrm removes the user, and the next package's postinst > > just calls "adduser", then the admin have no control over the reusing. > > If you want to allow automatic user/group removal, then adduser should > > be extended to remember every UID/GID that was ever used by a system > > user, and never reuse them again even if they have since been removed > > from /etc/passwd and/or /etc/group. > i don't think removing and reusing users is a good idea in practice. > what harm would there be in simply leaving the user account on the > system permenantly, with maybe locking the account and setting the > shell to /bin/false? In the general case, I can think of two reasons to remove users (but leave the ids reserved): namespace pollution, and user lookup performance when using flatfile /etc/passwd. Neither of these is particularly relevant for system accounts, but if adduser gained support for something like this I don't see any reason for system accounts to *not* use it. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. vorlon@debian.org http://www.debian.org/
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