Re: How to consistently install a set of packages?
On Fri, 7 Jun 2013 00:38:46 +1000
David <bouncingcats@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 07/06/2013, David <bouncingcats@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Also, 'man 8 useradd' does not state this either, for the --system
> > option. I saw there that useradd has exit status =9 if
> > "username already in use" and feared that would apply.
>
> Oops, I was mistakenly reading an old Fedora manpage. On wheezy,
> 'man 8 adduser' says:
> "If a user with the same name already exists in the system uid range
> [...] adduser will exit with a warning. This warning can be
> suppressed by adding --quiet".
>
> It is unclear to me if --quiet just suppresses the warning, or also
> the exit.
>
That would imply to me that the warning is suppressed. The action (i.e.
exit) will still take place.
I would be very surprised to find that a package which normally
installed a user and/or group would fail to make use of an existing
one of the correct name (i.e. would actually delete an existing
system user and create it again). At most it might modify other details
e.g. home directory if the existing values were incorrect, or removing
a password if one had been created, but I have doubts that most
packages would even do that.
I won't guarantee it could never happen, but I think the possibility is
unlikely enough to be worth following the suggestion, and creating
users and groups that match the existing /etc/passwd and /etc/group
before installing the packages. Don't forget any home directories and to
make sure the specified shell(s) will exist on the new system. It would
seem likely that creating a script which does the whole job in one go
would be the way to go, as it will be used more than once.
You would certainly see after package installation if any of your
values had been modified, and could change them back, along with
permissions on whatever directories had been set up.
I'd say this was a more useful strategy than trying to get the
installation order of packages repeatable without installing them one by
one.
Oh, you might want to steer clear of sid for the next month or two.
There's a lot of furniture being moved around at the moment, with a
fair few corners being knocked off of things. The new SNMP doesn't work
yet, and I've just had a delivery of broken CUPS, which I've declined.
--
Joe
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