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

[Marc Haber]

On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 07:17:47AM +0000, Stephen Gran wrote:
> This one time, at band camp, Andreas Barth said:
> > 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.

adduser is already Debian specific. It is a wrapper around useradd
which does things "right" from a Debian policy point of view, making
things easier for a package maintainer by making it harder to make
mistakes in postinst.

> > 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.

piuparts is already doing those MBFs. Maybe we don't make packages
blow up at install times first but we can print a warning.

Greetings
Marc