[Adduser-devel] Bug#763055: adduser: --quiet should not suppress fatal error messages

[Michal Sojka]

Package: adduser
Version: 3.113+nmu3
Severity: normal

Dear Maintainer,

according to the man page, --quiet is supposed to suppress only
informational messages, not errors or warnings. However there are cases
when addgroup returns a non-zero exit code without printing any message,
for example, when the group to be created already exists with a
different GID. I think that, at least, the following pieces of code
should not have the "if $verbose" suffix.

   printf STDERR (gtx("The group `%s' already exists and is not a system group. Exiting.\n"), $new_name) if $verbose;
   exit RET_OBJECT_ALREADY_EXISTS;

   printf STDERR (gtx("The group `%s' already exists, but has a different GID. Exiting.\n"), $new_name) if $verbose;
   exit RET_OBJECT_ALREADY_EXISTS;

See also https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=762275#32.

Best regards,
-Michal


-- System Information:
Debian Release: jessie/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 3.16-2-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages adduser depends on:
ii  debconf [debconf-2.0]  1.5.53
ii  passwd                 1:4.2-2+b1
ii  perl-base              5.20.1-1

adduser recommends no packages.

Versions of packages adduser suggests:
ii  liblocale-gettext-perl  1.05-8+b1
ii  perl-modules            5.20.1-1

-- debconf information:
  adduser/title:
  adduser/homedir-permission: true