[Piuparts-devel] Bug#877592: /usr/sbin/useradd: resetting tallylog makes other packages fail piuparts

[Simon McVittie]

Package: passwd
Version: 1:4.5-1
Severity: normal
File: /usr/sbin/useradd
Affects: piuparts dbus

Steps to reproduce: basically this:

    piuparts -b minbase.tar.gz --apt -d sid --mirror 'http://mirror/debian main' dbus

where minbase.tar.gz is the result of a minbase debootstrap of sid

Expected result: package that was previously piuparts-clean continues to be

Actual result:

0m25.7s ERROR: FAIL: Package purging left files on system:
  /var/log/tallylog      not owned

This appears to be because dbus invokes adduser, which invokes useradd,
which since 4.5 invokes /sbin/pam_tally2 to reset the user's record in
that file (if installed, regardless of whether pam_tally2 is enabled).
I think this would affect any other daemon that creates a user for
itself - dbus is not special here.

Please make this conditional on pam_tally2 actually being enabled,
or conditional on that file existing, or something; or reassign to pam
and ask for --reset to not do anything if the log doesn't already exist;
or reassign to piuparts and ask the piuparts maintainers to ignore that
log file. I've X-Debbugs-Cc'd the pam and piuparts maintainers, since
I'm not sure which of these packages should be changed.

Thanks,
    smcv