Adduser devel - Jul 2006 - Bug#378717: adduser: warning introduced as fix to 159345 should not be issued when adding system users

Package: adduser
Version: 3.94
Severity: minor

The warning introduced to fix #159345 is also shown when adding system
users. This does rarely make sense. An example is the cyrus-common-2.2
package (but I would guess that there are others that act accordingly),
which contains the /var/lib/cyrus directory, which is later (once the
user cyrus was created) assigned to that user. 

Currently, adduser unconditionally displays the following warning while
the cyrus user is created by postinst:

Warning: that home directory does not belong to the user you are
currently creating

As one of the cyrus-imapd packagers, I have two options to avoid showing
that warning to the user installing cyrus-common-2.2:
1) Don''t include the /var/lib/cyrus directory in the package.
   Drawback: dpkg doesn''t know the directory belongs to that package.
2) Redirect STDERR of adduser to /dev/null.
   Drawback: True errors of adduser aren''t shown to the user anymore.
So neither option seems to be the right one.

Therefor, I see two options to resolve our bug #378518, and both would
involve changes to the adduser package:
1) Make adduser suppress that warning when creating system users.
2) Add a commandline option to adduser to suppress that particular
   warning or all warnings.

I kindly ask you to implement one of those.

I thought about submitting this as a wishlist bug. However, since there
are probably other packages suffering from the same "regression" (a
bogus warning where there was no warning before), I decided against
that. Feel free to change the severity as you like.

Regards,
Sven

PS: If wanted, I can dig into the adduser source and see wether I could
implement (1) above, which I think is the better option.

Your message dated Tue, 18 Jul 2006 18:20:22 +0200
with message-id <44BD0A46.3050000@ciphirelabs.com>
and subject line Warning not issued with --no-create-home
has caused the attached Bug report to be marked as done.

This means that you claim that the problem has been dealt with.
If this is not the case it is now your responsibility to reopen the
Bug report if necessary, and/or fix the problem forthwith.

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From: Sven Mueller <debian@incase.de>
Subject: adduser: warning introduced as fix to 159345 should not be issued when
	adding system users
Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2006 16:27:14 +0200
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From: Sven Mueller <sm@ciphirelabs.com>
Subject: Warning not issued with --no-create-home
Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2006 18:20:22 +0200
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This one time, at band camp, Sven Mueller said:
> The warning introduced to fix #159345 is also shown when adding system
> users. This does rarely make sense. An example is the cyrus-common-2.2
> package (but I would guess that there are others that act accordingly),
> which contains the /var/lib/cyrus directory, which is later (once the
> user cyrus was created) assigned to that user. 
> 
> Currently, adduser unconditionally displays the following warning while
> the cyrus user is created by postinst:
> 
> Warning: that home directory does not belong to the user you are
> currently creating
> 
> As one of the cyrus-imapd packagers, I have two options to avoid showing
> that warning to the user installing cyrus-common-2.2:
> 1) Don''t include the /var/lib/cyrus directory in the package.
>    Drawback: dpkg doesn''t know the directory belongs to that
package.
> 2) Redirect STDERR of adduser to /dev/null.
>    Drawback: True errors of adduser aren''t shown to the user
anymore.
> So neither option seems to be the right one.
> 
> Therefor, I see two options to resolve our bug #378518, and both would
> involve changes to the adduser package:
> 1) Make adduser suppress that warning when creating system users.
> 2) Add a commandline option to adduser to suppress that particular
>    warning or all warnings.
> 
> I kindly ask you to implement one of those.
> 
> I thought about submitting this as a wishlist bug. However, since there
> are probably other packages suffering from the same "regression"
(a
> bogus warning where there was no warning before), I decided against
> that. Feel free to change the severity as you like.
Adding --ignore-uid-mismatch or some such would be easy enough to do,
but it seems like the right thing to do here is to just make your
scripts use --no-create-home.  This will skip this code path
altogether, and seems like the right thing to do if you ship the home
directory in the package anyway.  This is what I do in my packages that
create users and also have the directory in the deb.

Take care,
-- 
 -----------------------------------------------------------------
|   ,''''`.                                            Stephen
Gran |
|  : :'' :                                        sgran@debian.org |
|  `. `''                        Debian user, admin, and developer |
|    `-                                     http://www.debian.org |
 -----------------------------------------------------------------
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