[Openstack-devel] Bug#732387: Bug#732387: Adds user ceilometer to group nova and libvirt on every upgrade

[Thomas Goirand]

Hi Gaudenz,

First of all, thanks for taking the time to send bug reports. I'm very
happy to see that OpenStack gets more and more traction within the
Debian community.

On 12/17/2013 10:20 PM, Gaudenz Steinlin wrote:
> But this is actually not respecting local admin configurations. If an
> administrator decides (for whatever reason) that the ceilometer user
> should not be part of these groups

Well, if an admin decides this, then Ceilometer will not work anymore.
That admin might as well just remove ceilometer-common...

> this decision is reverted on every
> package upgrade. This violates Debian Policy section 10.7.3 which states
> that local modifications must be preserved.
> 
> The user should only be added to these groups on first install. On
> upgrades the group membership should not be changed.

The section 10.7.3 that you mention is under the chapter "Configuration
files" and has nothing to do with managing Unix user and groups.

Also, removing the unconditionality of the unix user/group management
would make this particular maintainer script not idempotent anymore,
which is a path that is very dangerous to take.

Also, I fail to see where else in the policy manual it is written that a
package cannot impose a particular user to be inside a specific group.
Please point to the correct policy manual section if you still think
this is wrong.

Whatever your reply will be, I don't think this bug deserves a severity
"serious" (to quote the release team: not all policy violation are RC
bugs), so I'm downgrading the severity.

Cheers,

Thomas Goirand (zigo)