[Pkg-shadow-devel] Bug#620898: Moving bash from essential/required to important?

[Ben Hutchings]

On Tue, 2011-04-05 at 01:49 +0200, Guillem Jover wrote:
[...]
> Well, we can always fix login to behave more robustly, no? :)
> 
> > If login worked consistently in the face of the configured shell going
> > missing (automatically falling back to /bin/sh for root), then I think it
> > would be worthwhile to do the work necessary to remove bash from the
> > essential set.  But until then, the primary purpose of Essential, to me, is
> > the "minimal set guaranteed to be usable" aspect, not the "you don't have to
> > depend on it" aspect.
> 
> That's more or less what the attached patch does. It could certainly be
> improved, as the knowledge of when to fallback is spread all over the
> place, but that's an existing problem in the code anyway.
[...]

This appears to open up any accounts that have been deliberately
disabled by setting their shell to a nonexistent path.  I know that's a
dumb way to disable an account, but that doesn't make this any less of a
security hole.

How about checking for the configured shell in /etc/shells before
enabling the fallback?

Ben.

-- 
Ben Hutchings
Once a job is fouled up, anything done to improve it makes it worse.
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