[Adduser-devel] Bug#516285: Bug#516285: It seems to accept anything for 'yes'

[Stephen Gran]

This one time, at band camp, Enrico Zini said:
> On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 01:40:09PM +0000, Stephen Gran wrote:
> > This one time, at band camp, Enrico Zini said:
> > > Is the information correct? [Y/n] p
> > > pico:/# adduser enrico
> > > adduser: The user `enrico' already exists.
> > > pico:/#
> > > Apparently, it was happy to take 'p' for a yes.
> > Since the default is 'yes', the code only looks to see if you've
> > actively negated the action.  I think, while perhaps slightly silly,
> > this is ultimately correct.
> 
> My rationale was that if garbage is detected, then one cannot assume to
> be able to interpret the will of the user.  In this case, it's quite
> easy to just ask again, instead of going on and creating an account with
> data that can potentially contain garbage.

Yeah, I can see that point of view.  I tend to think of adduser as a
program designed to be called from maintainer scripts, and it's
usefulnss to admins is kind of secondary (sort of like update-rc.d or
something).  This has led to lots of places in the code making
assumptions that if you're not actively saying no, we should proceed.

> But ultimately, I'll accept any judgement on this: it isn't really a big
> deal.

Fair enough - I'll think on it and see what Joerg has to say, and go
from there.

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