[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#499014: Bug#499014: Bug#499014: Bug#499014: dbus - Fails to install: chown: invalid group: `messagebus:messagebus'

[Loïc Minier]

severity 499014 wishlist
stop

On Mon, Sep 22, 2008, Michael Biebl wrote:
> >> 3.) Copied /etc/passwd around (without the corresponding /etc/group)
> > 
> > The package is not able to recover from error conditions, in this case a
> > missing group. How this happened is irrelevant.
> 
> I beg to disagree. There is a always a way how one can make a package
> fail to install (just try to delete sed or awk).
> The question is, what can be expected about the consistency of the
> system or not (like sed being available or passwd in a consistend state)

 I agree with Michael, there's no way we're going to make our
 maintenance harder with complex postinst scripts for the sake of
 recovering from unlikely local fuckups; restore from backup or fix your
 expectations that you can copy passwd and not copy group in a chroot.

 I'm ok with dealing with things like ldap nss and checking for the
 user/group already existing, but supporting things like "user is there
 and group isn't" will actually make our maintainer scripts more fragile
 and harder to test.


 Anyway, dealing with local hacks which break the system is wishlist at
 best.  Given that other packages are using adduser, I suggest you bring
 it up to a wider audience or the adduser maintainers.  One thing which
 Debian could do to help with such situation is have the user/group
 information for packages explicitely listed in some data file rather
 than coded in maintainer scripts, this data could be used to provide
 repair tools for broken user/group situations.  I wouldn't want each
 package using adduser to have its own repair code though.

-- 
Loïc Minier