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

[Stephen Gran]

This one time, at band camp, Sven Mueller said:
> 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.

Adding --ignore-uid-mismatch or some such would be easy enough to do,
but it seems like the right thing to do here is to just make your
scripts use --no-create-home.  This will skip this code path
altogether, and seems like the right thing to do if you ship the home
directory in the package anyway.  This is what I do in my packages that
create users and also have the directory in the deb.

Take care,
-- 
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|   ,''`.                                            Stephen Gran |
|  : :' :                                        sgran at debian.org |
|  `. `'                        Debian user, admin, and developer |
|    `-                                     http://www.debian.org |
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