Bug#1013983: lightdm-autologin-greeter: out-comment defunct autologin-user=AUTOLOGIN-USER-NOT-CONFIGURED in /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d/lightdm-autologin-greeter.conf

[Patrick Schleizer]

Package: lightdm-autologin-greeter
Severity: normal

Dear maintainer,

this is about the Debian package specific introduced file:
/etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d/lightdm-autologin-greeter.conf

I could not find it in the upstream repository.

Could you please out-comment "autologin-user=AUTOLOGIN-USER-NOT-CONFIGURED"?

I see no point for it.

Yes, as the comment above that line is saying "you really have to
configure the below, otherwise LightDM auto-login will fail..."  and
this is true. Yes, it's broken but it's not less broken by setting it to
"AUTOLOGIN-USER-NOT-CONFIGURED".

The stronger reason however is, if the user already added a lexically
lower configuration drop-in file into the /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d/
folder with the autologin setting then the package specific
lightdm-autologin-greeter.conf would actually overrule it, change to the
non-existing "AUTOLOGIN-USER-NOT-CONFIGURED" user.

Shipping helpful comments is good but it shouldn't do non-functional things.

Please also consider preconfiguration, local system administrators,
puppet and alike, Debian derivatives. These then have another file to
take care of which they have to either delete (and hope it's not
re-introduced by an apt upgrade) or modify. But modifications of files
in /etc shipped by Debian packages are troublesome since if the Debian
maintainer ever modifies the file again while at the same time the file
was locally modified, this causes an interactive dpkg conflict
resolution dialog during upgrading. These are difficult for users to
resolve and should they decide to take the package maintainers version,
they might actually break their autologin.

Kind regards,
Patrick