[email protected] (Marco d'Itri) writes: > On Jan 27, Russ Allbery <[email protected]> wrote:
>> the other base accounts on any system where INN or some other news >> server is not installed, and given that that's 99% of the Debian >> systems out there, I think it's best to leave the shell as invalid and >> teach administrators to use the -s option to su. We could change the >> shell when inn2 is installed... but that would be a huge pain to do >> properly and I don't think it's worth it. > This does not look to be harder than creating a new user. Well, there would need to be some way of coordinating between base-passwd and inn2 so that it didn't keep undoing the change. I can think of some ways to do this by adding more complexity to update-passwd to accept some supplemental overrides to the master files, or with debconf preseeding (although we would have to be careful to not override user responses), but it seemed tricky. > Actually I have been thinking about this for a few years: why not remove > from base-passwd the accounts which are used only by one or a few > cooperating packages (hello, gnats!) and have them created by the > packages themselves when needed? This has a version of the Essential problem: we know how the users are used (or not used) in the archive, or at least could probably find out, but not how they're used in various random systems out there. I suppose we could do something like not installing those users on initial installs but not removing them on upgrades. But it felt like a hard problem to sort through the backward-compatibility issues. -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
