Re: Some experiences with installation.
On Thu, 30 Nov 1995, Bruce Perens wrote:
> The problem is that we want to get a user name to which to mail
> error messages, etc., and we want that name to be valid right away.
> Perhaps we should let the user feed in some existing configuration
> files (passwd, group, etc.) from floppy disk?
That would be really nice. Recently we installed Debian over Slackware,
and we wanted to keep our previous users as intact as possible. Initially
we though of replacing /etc/passwd with the old file as we did when we
switched to Slackware, but I didn't liked this idea because I wasn't so
sure that could do the tick rigth. The other option was adding every user
by hand, and replacing UID's and GID's on the existing home directories.
This was what I actully did, but that meant a lot of work. I think it
could be nice to have a script to do this. Basically it should take
existing passwd et al files, extract GECOS information, and build a new
passwd file Debian-style (different login groups for each user), and
change old UID's and GID's on existing directories.
Also, it would be really nice to have an adduser script that could work a
bit more like OSF's (Digital Unix) one. OSF askes for login name,
password, real name, office and all that stuff, *and* login group and
other groups the user should be placed on.
-Marcelo
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