[Adduser-devel] Bug#316089: chage fails if plain passwd in use

Colin Watson Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>, 316089@bugs.debian.org
Thu, 14 Jul 2005 13:26:10 +0100


On Tue, Jul 05, 2005 at 04:13:18PM +0200, Marc Haber wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 28, 2005 at 03:17:29PM +0200, Marc Haber wrote:
> > shadow maintainers, would you be willing to make the case of "no
> > shadow passwords in use, chage will fail" easily detectable from
> > inside adduser? Or am I better off by jumping through hoops in adduser
> > to find out whether shadow passwords are in use?
> 
> Unfortunately, the shadow maintainers haven't replied to this message
> which was also sent to shadow@p.d.o. I am thus cloning the bug to
> shadow.
> 
> Shadow maintainers, please consider adding a switch to chage which
> doesn't make chage fail if no shadow passwords are in use.

Since the shadow maintainers at least gave it a distinct exit code, I
added a really cheap and nasty hack in Ubuntu to work around this; since
the whole situation broke debootstrap, it was blocking a lot of my work,
and I had to do something urgently ...

  &systemcall('/bin/sh', '-c', '/usr/bin/chage -M 99999 ' . quotemeta($new_name) . '; RET=$?; [ $RET -eq 3 ] && exit 0; exit $RET');

I don't know if this is the approach you want to take; a flag to chage
to suppress the error message would certainly be neater, but as has been
mentioned it would require a versioned dependency.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson@debian.org]