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Re: package adding users



Matt Zimmerman <mdz@debian.org> writes:

> On Tue, Apr 06, 2004 at 03:45:46PM +0200, Francesco P. Lovergine wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Apr 06, 2004 at 09:18:20AM -0400, Erik Bourget wrote:
>> > What's the best/accepted way to have a package add users to a Debian
>> > system?  I have a daemon that has no need to run as root (but a need to
>> > store its own datafiles, etc, so nobody is out) and would like to have it
>> > run under a user account.  Gerrit Pape's qmail package does an ugly
>> > hit-control-c-if-you-don't-want-these-users thing that I don't like.
>> 
>> Use useradd. Generally you could also use debconf to ask
>> confirmation/usernames for that, but it's not mandatory.
>
> adduser is the correct tool.  See policy 9.2.2.
>
> I do not think that useradd follows, e.g., the uid allocation guidelines in
> that section, and adduser's semantics are more convenient for maintainer
> scripts as well.

Am I crazy, or is the --system option not available in woody for deluser?
What's a 'nice way' to delete a system user if it exists (i.e. in postrm),
deluser username || true (so the failure doesn't scuttle the postrm script)?

- Erik



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