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Re: Bits from the release team: the plans for etch



This one time, at band camp, Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña said:
> On Wed, Oct 26, 2005 at 08:18:42AM +0200, Marc Haber wrote:
> > On Tue, 25 Oct 2005 22:21:18 +0200, Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña
> > <jfs@computer.org> wrote:
> > >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.
> 
> And that's something that packages maintainer scripts have to cope
> with since they don't know beforehand if it's there and it certainly
> doe snot have the same attirbutes (it might only share the name)

While I appreciate the effort at a standard shell script fragment for
'install a user', and think that it would be useful as reference and for
reuse, I tend to think making it a dh_ fragment doesn't work in the
normal use cases I can think of.  Ordinarily, when a package installs a
user, the logic of the maintainer script goes something like:

add user

chown a bunch of stuff to the new user

start the daemon

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm imagining this dh_ fragment being added
by the DEBHELPER blob at the end, and so anything needed to be done
in between adding the user and starting the daemon (the other common
and useful debhelper fragment in this sort of case) kind of blows up.
Unless I'm missing the way you were going to implement this.

But, seriously, it does sound like a useful reference piece, even if it
can't be added automatically.  If it can, so much the better.

Take care,
-- 
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|   ,''`.                                            Stephen Gran |
|  : :' :                                        sgran@debian.org |
|  `. `'                        Debian user, admin, and developer |
|    `-                                     http://www.debian.org |
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