[Adduser-devel] Bug#679746: Bug#679746: Bug#679746: default --system home directory leads to piuparts RC bugs

[Stephen Gran]

This one time, at band camp, Andreas Barth said:
> * Stephen Gran (sgran at debian.org) [121212 08:19]:
> > This one time, at band camp, Andreas Barth said:
> > > > Now, I don't agree that this is a bug in adduser - I think this is a bug
> > > > in packages invoking adduser.  I think the right way to do this is a
> > > > mass bug filing on those packages.
> > > 
> > > I think I disagree here.
> > > 
> > > If we have a switch on adduser "--system" saying that the user to be
> > > created is a system-user, I tend to think that adduser should then
> > > select an appropriate place to create $HOME. (I wouldn't mind if we
> > > say that for the upcoming release, this still is within /home, and we
> > > fix that for the next stable release.)
> > 
> > Where would you suggest? 
> 
> I suggest to tolerate the current behaviour for the upcoming release.
> Afterwards, I suggest to either require either --no-home or --home for
> system users. Or switch defaults to another location, e.g.
> /var/lib/syshome (or whatever else).

Ew.  That seems to me to be inventing something ad-hoc and
Debian-specific, which feels wrong.

> > I can't think of a better place, in the
> > absence of direction, than /home.  If packages rely on the presence of a
> > home directory, it's up to them to ask for a sensible one.
> 
> Currently, packages become RC-buggy for just adding system users
> without --no-home and no --home (even if not relying on the
> directory). I think that - if we read policy as that - then it's
> better to fail the postinst then to have hidden RC bugs. Explicit RC
> bugs are always better then well hidden ones. (Of course, all of that
> for after this cycle.)

So we're not going to do an MBF, but we're going to make code changes
so that packages blow up at install time and users do the MBF for us,
one by one?  How bizarre.  That can't be what you're actually saying.

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