Bug#900354: lintian: warn against guarding adduser/addgroup calls

[Chris Lamb]

Chris Lamb wrote:

> > >> <@weasel> "guarding adduser calls considered harmful"
> > > 
> > > … regardless of --system or? oh, some concrete examples of "good" and
> > > "bad" would be really helpful here in ensuring we implement exactly
> > > what you after if you could spend a couple of seconds on that?
> > > 
> > I would think adduser/addgroup without --system in maintainer scripts
> > should be verboten altogether.  I'll try to poke through codesearch to
> > find other examples later.
> 
> Great stuff — looking forward to receiving these. :)

Gentle ping on this, Julien?


Regards,

-- 
  ,''`.
 : :'  : Chris Lamb
 `. `'`  la...@debian.org / chris-lamb.co.uk
   `-

Bug#900354: lintian: warn against guarding adduser/addgroup calls

[Chris Lamb]

Dear Julien,

> >> <@weasel> "guarding adduser calls considered harmful"
> > 
> > … regardless of --system or? oh, some concrete examples of "good" and
> > "bad" would be really helpful here in ensuring we implement exactly
> > what you after if you could spend a couple of seconds on that?
> > 
> I would think adduser/addgroup without --system in maintainer scripts
> should be verboten altogether.  I'll try to poke through codesearch to
> find other examples later.

Great stuff — looking forward to receiving these. :)


Regards,

-- 
  ,''`.
 : :'  : Chris Lamb
 `. `'`  la...@debian.org / chris-lamb.co.uk
   `-

Bug#900354: lintian: warn against guarding adduser/addgroup calls

[Julien Cristau]

On 05/29/2018 04:28 PM, Chris Lamb wrote:
> tags 900354 + moreinfo
> thanks
> 
> Hi Julien,
> 
> Thanks for the report.
> 
>> <@weasel> "guarding adduser calls considered harmful"
> 
> … regardless of --system or? oh, some concrete examples of "good" and
> "bad" would be really helpful here in ensuring we implement exactly
> what you after if you could spend a couple of seconds on that?
> 
I would think adduser/addgroup without --system in maintainer scripts
should be verboten altogether.  I'll try to poke through codesearch to
find other examples later.

Cheers,
Julien

Bug#900354: lintian: warn against guarding adduser/addgroup calls

[Chris Lamb]

tags 900354 + moreinfo
thanks

Hi Julien,

Thanks for the report.

> <@weasel> "guarding adduser calls considered harmful"

… regardless of --system or? oh, some concrete examples of "good" and
"bad" would be really helpful here in ensuring we implement exactly
what you after if you could spend a couple of seconds on that?


Best wishes,

-- 
  ,''`.
 : :'  : Chris Lamb
 `. `'`  la...@debian.org / chris-lamb.co.uk
   `-

Bug#900354: lintian: warn against guarding adduser/addgroup calls

[Julien Cristau]

Package: lintian
Severity: wishlist

<@weasel> not that I'd file a bug about this, but I don't like this pattern:
<@weasel> if ! getent group "$REPRO_GROUP" >/dev/null; then
<@weasel> addgroup --system "$REPRO_GROUP" || exit 1
<@weasel> fi
<@weasel> the goal of --system is to a) not fail if the group exists and
is a system group
<@weasel> but also, to b) fail if the group exists and isn't a system group
<@jcristau> ack
<@weasel> since in that case we don't want to use that group as it might
be for whoknowswhat.
<@weasel> maybe this is something that should be brought to the
attention of qa, release, or the developers at large.
<@weasel> "guarding adduser calls considered harmful"
<@jcristau> seems like something lintian could catch
<@weasel> yup

Cheers,
Julien