LSB specification for adding users and groups

[Daniel Quinlan <quinlan@transmeta.com>]

Jakob 'sparky' Kaivo <jkaivo@ndn.net> writes:

> Comparing RH 5.2 and Debian 2.1, both have an adduser command as well
> as useradd. On RH, adduser is a symlink to useradd, which is from
> shadow utils. On Debian, useradd is the same showdow utils command,
> and adduser is a (quite different) Perl script apparently Debian
> specific. All are non-interactive and allow specifying of several
> options such as UID, GID, etc.

Okay, could I get someone to summarize the functional differences
between the Debian adduser script and the "standard" useradd program
(originally from the shadow utils and AT&T/SVR4)?

My current plan is to base the LSB user/group specification on the
useradd tools, mostly because it seems to be present on all Linux
distributions, but also because it is used by lots of Unix applications
and would make porting installation scripts to Linux easier.

(I'd like LSB applications that install users and groups (using the LSB
user/group specification) to avoid making things difficult for Debian.)

- Dan