[Pkg-net-snmp-devel] Bug#606784: snmpd: package fails to upgrade properly from lenny

[Jonathan Wiltshire]

(dropping the submitter, there's a deeper problem here)

On Sat, Dec 18, 2010 at 11:01:22PM +0100, Julien Cristau wrote:
> the postinst does:
> 
> if [ "x$1" = xconfigure ]; then
>         if [ ! `getent group snmp >/dev/null` ]; then
>                  deluser --quiet --system snmp
>         fi
>         adduser --quiet --system --group --no-create-home --home /var/lib/snmp snmp
>         chown -R snmp:snmp /var/lib/snmp
> fi
> 
> Which seems pretty weird.  What is this trying to do?

Mmm, I hadn't dug this far. As it's not my package I've no idea what the
intention was, but the call to adduser first appears in the Lenny package
without a --group option, so the system user gets added to nogroup. This
looks like an attempt to give the snmp user an snmp group if that's the
case. Indeed, r286 and r293 in SVN, and bug #520724 seem to back this up.

Being a bit green at this sort of thing, is this neccessary to ensure the
user and group have the same ID or is it acceptable to:
 - move the call to adduser above the test, which will fail gracefully if
   the user already exists
 - then test for the presence of a group snmp
 - if there isn't, create it and add the user to it?

Thanks,


-- 
Jonathan Wiltshire                                      jmw at debian.org
Debian Developer                         http://people.debian.org/~jmw

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