[Adduser-devel] Bug#348250: adduser creates /etc/group.lock

[Stephen Gran]

Hello,

I suspect it has to be one of the external programs adduser calls that is
at fault here, and not adduser itself.  All of the passwd/group editing
programs have to (well, really really should) lock the files before
update, and the lock file you see is just that.  I see no code in adduser
to create a lock file - all the actual changes are done by groupadd and
so forth, so probably one of those programs bailed and died, leaving a
lock behind.  

In the particular case of adding a regular user account and also adding a
group account, groupadd -g is called to add the group and then useradd is
called to create the user and add them to the previously created group.
Do you want to reassign this bug to those programs?  It seems like the
right thing, but I don't really know the internals of adduser that well
yet (I've been looking it over yesterday and today).

Fortunately, the lock files 'expire', but it's still not great to leave
them laying around.
-- 
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|   ,''`.                                            Stephen Gran |
|  : :' :                                        sgran at debian.org |
|  `. `'                        Debian user, admin, and developer |
|    `-                                     http://www.debian.org |
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