Re: Create user during installation
On Thu, 2005-03-31 at 23:20 +0200, Jeroen van Wolffelaar wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 31, 2005 at 11:13:39PM +0200, Tilman Koschnick wrote:
> > On Thu, 2005-03-31 at 22:47 +0200, Jeroen van Wolffelaar wrote:
> > > Ugh, no. Do *not* remove users on purge, it's reason for all kinds of
> > > problems, amongst others that you can never assure all files owned by
> > > that user are removed, and therefore leaving userless files on the
> > > system. You can't even do a global find, because some partitions can
> > > happen to not be mounted, or others are in fact very slow tape robots.
> > >
> > > Leave the deletion of obsolete users up to the system administrator, do
> > > not do so on purge.
> >
> > What about small daemons that don't generate any files and don't require
> > anything apart from what's in the package?
>
> In general, you cannot assume that the administator doesn't use the user
> for other stuff too, related (or not) to the package. An extra user
> entry really doesn't hurt anything, so can safely be left.
I thought that was kind of the destinction between remove and purge.
Purge tries to remove as much as the package scripts actually can - if
the administrator didn't add anything, this would mean everything. If
the administrator wants related stuff to stay around, they just remove a
package. If they want to purge a package, they should take care of
removing anything they added on top as well.
What are the implications of userless files? What kind of problem do
they pose? I guess one problem would be if a new user is generated with
the same id, they would own the leftover files... Not good, I agree.
Cheers, Til
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