Bug#408361: [pkg-firebird-general] Bug#408361: firebird2-common: must pre-depend on adduser, not depend on it

[Lucas Nussbaum]

On 26/01/07 at 00:59 +0000, Stephen Gran wrote:
> This one time, at band camp, Lucas Nussbaum said:
> > 
> > Well, it's chfn that prompts for a password, actually. Configuring
> > adduser (i.e: letting it run its postinst) solves the problem.
> 
> chfn is not called in the add system user code path, typically (unless
> your package also sets up gecos fields for the system account, which
> would be unusual but not impossible).  I can not reproduce this bug
> report at all.

See this ps output:
 \_ apt-get install firebird2-common
    \_ /usr/bin/dpkg --status-fd 10 --unpack /var/cache/apt/archives/liblocale-gettext-perl_1.05-1_i386.deb [...] 
        \_ /bin/sh /var/lib/dpkg/tmp.ci/preinst install
           \_ adduser
               \_ /usr/bin/chfn -f Firebird Database Administator firebird

> Lucas: the output you showed really looks like the output for a non-system
> user being added.  Are you sure there is no mistake?  Adduser's postinst
> does nothing that could make any difference here (it creates a default
> config file, but the values are already the same as the values defined
> in the library - nothing changes).

I investigated this issue further. The problem is actually not that adduser is
not configured at that point, but that passwd (which is required but not
essential) is not configured at that point. So a "simpler" solution would be to
pre-depends on passwd. However, it seems to me that's it's more logical to
actually pre-depend on adduser, since that's what we are really using in
preinst here.

Note: to reproduce the error, try: apt-get install debfoster ; debfoster -f -o MaxPriority=required apt ; apt-get install firebird2-common

> > > Moving the adduser call to postinst is possible, but I am not
> > > convinced it is worth the trouble. A couple of packages (all in the
> > > same source package as firebird2-common - firebrid2) depend on
> > > firebird2-common being done with the account creation and I prefer to
> > > have a strong reason to fiddle with them just before the release.
> 
> If the other packages only do things with the account in their postinst,
> a regular Depends will do.

Changing this might be a bit risky so close from the release.

> Dependencies ensure that firebird-common's
> postinst will run before any of the firebird-* postinsts.  I am not
> familiar with the packages, though, so I will not press it.
> 
> > chfn misbehaves if adduser is not configured? How nice :)
> 
> Extremely unlikely, given that they don't interoperate.

see above

> > >> Can you give me a recipe for
> > >> reproducing it?
> > > 
> > > In a chroot (preferably):
> > > apt-get remove --purge adduser ; apt-get install firebird2-common
> > 
> > Didn't work (i.e, package installs ok with no problems. Very strange).
> 
> I wouldn't expect it to.

see above
-- 
| Lucas Nussbaum
| lucas at lucas-nussbaum.net   http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/ |
| jabber: lucas at nussbaum.fr             GPG: 1024D/023B3F4F |
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
Url : http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-firebird-general/attachments/20070126/89065fcb/attachment.pgp