[Adduser-devel] Bug#472349: Bug#472349: adduser: please delay more than 5 seconds during deluser root

[Stephen Gran]

This one time, at band camp, Paul Johnson said:
> On Sunday 23 March 2008 10:53:15 am Justin Pryzby wrote:
> 
> > This patch explicit statement that there is a time limit; without
> > this, users are likely to reread the huge warning rather than quickly
> > aborting/suspending the process to investigate.
> 
> With something as grave as removing the root account, wouldn't it make much 
> more sense to ask for explicit confirmation to be entered and wait 
> indefinitely until that happens, similar to what you must do in dpkg or apt 
> if you try to remove base required packages?  adduser/deluser sometimes get 
> called by apt themselves, possibly while the operator who called it has 
> abandoned their console to go get coffee or take care of some other task.  

This bug is mostly harmless when deluser is called without a foolish
flag like --remove-home or worse, --remove-all-files.  It is possible,
of course, to say "no, you can't ever do that", but I do feel a little
uncomfortable second guessing an admin who wants to do something
drastically stupid - unix doesn't generally do that.

I agree that the harm caused by allowing people to effectively ask for
removal of the root account and all files that are uid 0 is stupid, so
what I propose is: allow removal of a uid 0 account, provided the
username is not root.  Also, fail before doing anything if either of
--remove-home or --remove-all-files is given.  Seem reasonable?
-- 
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|   ,''`.                                            Stephen Gran |
|  : :' :                                        sgran at debian.org |
|  `. `'                        Debian user, admin, and developer |
|    `-                                     http://www.debian.org |
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