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Bug#788657: libutempter0: doesn't clean up unused/retired utempter group



Hey Felix

On Sun, 2015-06-14 at 11:46 +0200, Felix Geyer wrote:
> You can't be certain that there are no files on the system that have
> been chgrp to that group.
> If the group is removed its gid might get reused.

Sure,... which is IMHO one of the several general deficiencies of how
Debian handles their system users/groups.
But the same would apply to many other packages as well, which in fact
*do* remove their users/groups at purge, for many of them where it is
even much more likely that people actually used it.


> The cost of having one more entry in /etc/group is really small so
> I've decided not to remove the group on upgrade.
> 
> See also https://wiki.debian.org/AccountHandlingInMaintainerScripts
> for some more discussion about the pros and cons of removing 
> accounts.

May I suggest then, that you add an entry to the NEWS file, where you
tell that this is no longer used, and people can typically safely
remove it if nothing on their system still uses these as owners?
Perhaps even giving a example find / -group foo command to look for
such files?

That way people would have a more likely chance to notice that change
and keep their systems consistent with what fresh installations would
have.


Thanks,
Chris.

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