On Thu, Dec 17, 2015 at 01:56:50PM +0100, Marc Haber wrote: > how to handle an account on package purge is a discussion going on for > more than a decade now. After the umpteenth re-hash of the issue on > #debian-devel, I have gotten the impression that there is rough > consensus for not deleting system accounts on package purge. The most > prominent argument for this situation is that the local admin might > have given file ownership to the account while the package was > installed, and when the account is deleted and its uid re-used later, > those files may become accessible to an unintended entity.
I have filed #1006912 against policy to solicit the policy editor's opinion. adduser might probably go ahead prematurely by implementing deluser --lock --system, locking an account if it's a system account. Greetings Marc
