[Adduser-devel] Bug#378717: adduser: warning introduced as fix to 159345 should not be issued when adding system users

[Sven Mueller]

Package: adduser
Version: 3.94
Severity: minor

The warning introduced to fix #159345 is also shown when adding system
users. This does rarely make sense. An example is the cyrus-common-2.2
package (but I would guess that there are others that act accordingly),
which contains the /var/lib/cyrus directory, which is later (once the
user cyrus was created) assigned to that user. 

Currently, adduser unconditionally displays the following warning while
the cyrus user is created by postinst:

Warning: that home directory does not belong to the user you are
currently creating

As one of the cyrus-imapd packagers, I have two options to avoid showing
that warning to the user installing cyrus-common-2.2:
1) Don't include the /var/lib/cyrus directory in the package.
   Drawback: dpkg doesn't know the directory belongs to that package.
2) Redirect STDERR of adduser to /dev/null.
   Drawback: True errors of adduser aren't shown to the user anymore.
So neither option seems to be the right one.

Therefor, I see two options to resolve our bug #378518, and both would
involve changes to the adduser package:
1) Make adduser suppress that warning when creating system users.
2) Add a commandline option to adduser to suppress that particular
   warning or all warnings.

I kindly ask you to implement one of those.

I thought about submitting this as a wishlist bug. However, since there
are probably other packages suffering from the same "regression" (a
bogus warning where there was no warning before), I decided against
that. Feel free to change the severity as you like.

Regards,
Sven

PS: If wanted, I can dig into the adduser source and see wether I could
implement (1) above, which I think is the better option.