Re: deluser on purge (was: Piuparts testing status update)
On Tue, Nov 14, 2006 at 10:01:16PM -0800, Don Armstrong wrote:
> On Tue, 14 Nov 2006, Russ Allbery wrote:
> > This is something that I'd really like to see us sort out in policy,
> > since I think we should be able to describe consistent behavior with
> > regard to system users and package purging to our users.
>
> What makes the most sense to me is to not delete the user, and warn
> that this has not been done. (I'm really not sure how best to do the
> warning besides outputing to STDERR.)
There could be a cron job sending a weekly mail listing all users that
are orphans from purged packages. That cron job should honor a white
list of local orphan accounts that should not be listed.
And there should be a tool to remove (one/all) orphan user(s).
> This avoids the obvious problems with deleting a user who may still
> own files on the system, and then recreating a different username for
> a different program with the same uid which shouldn't have access to
> those files
The issue are files on offline media or on NFS shared that were not
mounted at package purge.
Greetings
Marc
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