[Pkg-shadow-devel] Bug#295416: Deleting a user group in userdel should only be done if the group is empty

[Alexander Gattin]

Hi!

On Sat, Apr 30, 2005 at 08:14:14PM +0200, Marc Haber wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 19, 2005 at 07:15:51AM +0200, Christian Perrier wrote:
> > Marc, CC'ing youš: what is your opinion about the "right" behaviour
> > from userdel (from deluser point of view) when a user group has an
> > extra member and not the user him/herself only?
> > 
> > -userdel should fail and not remove the user groups
> > 
> > -userdel should remove the user group but not fail, just issue a
> >  warning
> 
> I think that basically userdel should behave as it behaves everywhere,
> to keep people who want (or need) to use the low-level tools are not
> in for any surprises.

So it will delete user and leave group in place,
[when the group has other members in it], as far
as I remember the common behaviour [of userdel].

> Deluser does things before calling userdel, so I think that userdel
> should do what has been requested as good as possible without failing.
> This is most likely the way that won't have the system end up in a
> badly inconsistent state.

Probably we should consider the following functional
split between adduser/deluser (i.e. high-level) and
useradd/userdel (low-level) tools:

* low-level tools should care of and keep the minimal
  consistency and integrity of the data that affects
  correct operation of these low-level tools
  themselves (so that e.g. results of useradd are
  revertable with userdel).
  I mean that useradd/userdell should only preserve
  integrity of /etc/passwd, shadow, group, gshadow and
  other most necessary files.
  These tools shouldn't care much about home dirs,
  NIS/LDAP/whatever interoperability, umasks/perms,
  mail spool files, good/bad user/groupnames and other
  sort of high-level consistency checks.

* all policy and high-level consistency checks are
  "praerogativa" of high-level tools.

The same I state in bug #264879, although rather
implicitly.

P.S. please, keep in mind that bug #295416 is not about
deleting group which has other members in it.
The bug is about userdel removing group which is
_primary_ for someone else (not having other _members_).

-- 
WBR,
xrgtn