Re: Question on the use of "/nonexistent"
On Sat, Dec 18, 2021 at 12:51:56PM -0500, Jason Franklin wrote:
> Greetings:
>
> I am a developer who is new to making contributions to Debian. Most of
> my work so far has been focused on making improvements to the "adduser"
> package. Of course, bug triage is one of the first things on which I am
> trying to show progress.
>
> On the relevant BTS page, I came across this bug:
>
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=152195
>
> A summary of this bug is below...
>
> # adduser --system --no-create-home foo
> # getent passwd foo
> foo:x:130:65534::/home/foo:/usr/sbin/nologin
>
> As you can see, "/home/foo" is named as the new user's home directory,
> but that directory is not created due to the "--no-create-home" option.
>
> This was reported many years ago and was given the "wontfix" tag. I
> believe this should be reversed since Debian policy now has this to
> say...
>
> https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-opersys.html#non-existent-home-directories
>
> I hope to see that, whenever possible, the "adduser" tools conform to
> Debian Policy when managing the addition and removal of users and
> groups.
This seems to be a misunderstanding of the purpose of --no-create-home.
This option does not say that the user does not have a home directory,
but that it should not be created by adduser, and instead will be create
later by some other procedure, for example by setting pam_mkhomedir
to create it on first login, or by mounting a NFS filesystem on /home,
etc.
In this bug report, users used --no-create-home but failed to create the
home directory themselves.
It seems that what they wanted to do was '--home /nonexistent'
I would suggest you add an option --no-homedir that do '--home /nonexistent'
or whatever is appropriate and close this bug.
Or you can close this bug without adding a new option. It mostly have
hostorical value now.
Cheers,
Bill.
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