Re: Bug#621833: System users: removing them
On Sun, May 29, 2011 at 08:32:21PM +0100, Roger Leigh wrote:
> We could add special behaviour to adduser to unlock the account
> if it already exists when run in the postinst.
Yes.
> However, most postinsts wrap the call to adduser with a check for
> whether the account already exists,
Which would be a bug in the maintainer scripts.
> I dislike the fact that the behaviour of adduser and deluser would,
> in effect, /not/ add or delete users as intended, which is rather
> counter-intuitive.
adduser --system is designed (and, IIRC, documented) to have the
effect of "after the call to adduser --system, the account will exist
and is useable. The only case when adduser --system really errors out
is when the account already exists but is not a system account."
> Providing that we have consensus on a recommended strategy for
> locking and unlocking accounts which can go into policy, I think all
> we need are examples for how maintainer scripts are expected to
> handle account creation and locking/unlocking.
The would be rather easy. Account creation/unlocking would happen with
an unwrapped call to adduser --system, account locking with a call to
the appropriate back-end command, or we could add an lockuser command
to the adduser package. I think, the latter would be preferable since
we would then be able to add sugar to the locking process. A wishlist
bug against adduser is in order.
Greetings
Marc, with a rather worn and dusty adduser hat on
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