[Adduser-devel] Bug#408148: adduser: Wrong failure message on invalid group name.

[Fabio Pugliese Ornellas]

Package: adduser
Version: 3.63
Severity: normal

I can not explain how the following can happen:

root at ampere:/var/lib/cvs# addgroup 'a:a'
addgroup: To avoid problems, the username should consist of
letters, digits, underscores, periods and dashes. For compatibility with
Samba machine accounts $ is also supported at the end of the username
root at ampere:/var/lib/cvs# addgroup 'a_a'
addgroup: Please enter a username matching the regular expression
configured
via the name_regex configuration variable.  Use the `--force-badname'
option to relax this check or reconfigure name_regex.
root at ampere:/var/lib/cvs#

The first message tells me that the second call of addgroup should work,
but it does not. The more strange is that it the error message the
second time is different. And it also mention name_regex that is nowhere
to be found (I did not digged at the source code to find out...). Also,
I could not find any documentation on valid group names. Only at
adduser.conf(5) I found USER_REGEX that configures user names (not group
names).

Hope this helps.

Thank you.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 3.1
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.8-3-686
Locale: LANG=pt_BR, LC_CTYPE=pt_BR (charmap=ISO-8859-1)

Versions of packages adduser depends on:
ii  debconf                 1.4.30.13        Debian configuration management sy
ii  passwd                  1:4.0.3-31sarge9 change and administer password and
ii  perl-base               5.8.4-8sarge5    The Pathologically Eclectic Rubbis

-- debconf information:
  adduser/homedir-permission: true