Re: adduser claims existing diretory in postinst when running piuparts for shiny-server

[Ansgar <ansgar@43-1.org>]

Hi,

On Fri, 2022-05-20 at 09:37 +0200, Andreas Tille wrote:
> the Debian Science team has packaged node-shiny-server[1].
> It creates a system user in its postinst script.  I've added
> some debug output to this script[2] since I wanted to debug
> a piuparts issue which you can see here in salsa CI[3].
> 
> This log shows two ways to verify that the home directory
> of the user does not exist, but adduser fails with
> 
>      Stopped: Couldn't create home directory `/home/shiny': File
> exists.
> 
> anyway.
> 
> Any idea what's going on here and how to fix this?

It seems wrong for a system user to use a directory below /home.

Ansgar