[Pkg-shadow-devel] Re: Bug#304398: chfn: does not work as documented in its man page.

[Nicolas François]

Hello,

On Tue, Apr 12, 2005 at 11:23:49PM +0200, Jonay Gomez wrote:
> Program chfn does not work as documented in its man page.
> 
> The man page says any normal user can update, for his own user account,
> the "fullname" part of the GCOS field.
> 
> That is not true in Debian-Woody for the chfn command and the "fullname"
> part of any normal user account GCOS field. (I don't have Debian-Sarge
> here but it is trivial to try whether this bug is there too or not.)

On woody, the end of the chfn man page indicates that "The file,
/etc/login.defs, defines some configuration options that affects how
chfn operates, especially for non-root users."

In fact, /etc/login.defs contains a CHFN_RESTRICT variable which permits
users to change their own Full Name field (you just need to add an 'f'
there).


Note: the Sarge man page is even clearer:
"A normal user may only change the fields for her own account, subject to the
restrictions in /etc/login.defs.  (The default configuration is to
prevent users from changing their fullname.)"

So I think this bug can be closed.

Best Regards
-- 
Nekral