[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#496221: invalid group "haldaemon"

[Michael Biebl]

severity 496221 important
thanks

Robert Millan wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 07:06:05PM +0200, Michael Biebl wrote:
>> Robert Millan wrote:
>>> On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 06:21:27PM +0200, Michael Biebl wrote:
>>>> I'd be interested how it is possible, that a user haldaemon exists, but
>>>> no group haldaemon. Have you copied /etc/passwd from somewhere else?
>>>> Do you use something like ldap or NIS (where the haldaemon user is
>>>> defined). Anything special about your setup.
>>> This is a chroot;  I copied /etc/passwd along with /etc/group when creating
>>> it, but that must have been a while ago.  Anyway, the original versions I used
>>> are from an etch system and have both the user and the group.
>> So, in the chroot (where you get the failure) you have a /etc/passwd
>> with a haldaemon user, but a /etc/group with no haldaemon group. Is that
>> correct?
> 
> No, both have it.  I have no idea if it was like this before the postinst
> failure or not.  Maybe we won't be able to find out...
> 
> I still think it'd be a good idea to just check for both things separately
> without making the assumptions.

I've looked at the postinst scripts that are installed on my system.
The majority of them (all besides two) simply use the --group option of
adduser to create a system group together with the system user.
None of them does special checks to test if the system user already
exists but the system group doesn't.
So I'm wondering if it makes sense to add such checks to the hal package
alone.
Alternatively
a) we address this in all existing maintainer scripts,
b) we change the behaviour of adduser to behave differently/more
gracefully in such a case
c) or we simply assume there is always a way to shoot oneself in the
foot (like copying /etc/passwd around)

Cheers,
Michael

-- 
Why is it that all of the instruments seeking intelligent life in the
universe are pointed away from Earth?


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