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

[Stephen Gran]

Hi,

This one time, at band camp, Marc Haber said:
> On Sun, Jul 01, 2012 at 03:43:42PM +0100, Stephen Gran wrote:
> > This one time, at band camp, Marc Haber said:
> > > Thus, packages using adduser --system and relying on adduser doing the
> > > right thing will get a piuparts-based RC bug in no time. Adduser
> > > should change its default behavior to something that QA will accept.
> > 
> > And what directory would that be, then?
> 
> Since policy does not give any hints about that, adduser --system
> should probably insist on --home being given.

I think I'd like to summarize, if I may:

Policy says packages can't rely on the layout of /home/
Some packages invoke adduser --system without the switch --home
In this case, adduser creates a user with $HOME under /home/

There is so far no evidence that these packages rely on the presence of
that directory

You think this is a release-critical bug in adduser

You have filed this as we freeze

Congratulations.

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.

Your suggestion of a 'fix' makes lots of packages insta-buggy, which is
effectively the same as a mass bug-filing.

So, unless you can give me compelling arguments that this is actually
adduser's problem to solve, I'd like you to talk about your prospective
mass bug-filing on -devel.

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