[Pkg-shadow-devel] Why does chage change root password after requesting password aging parameters?

[Christian Perrier]

> Some of the problems encountered recently with the new experimental package
> are due to the 404 patch being commented out.

Yep, I suspected this but it was interesting to try this.

> IIRC, the issue in debian was triggered by a call to pam_chauthtok, which
> changed the authentication token not for the user, but for root.
> I did not checked for chage, but this is probably the same reason.
> 
> This may be due to a PAM configuration (we should check all /etc/pam.d/
> files) or PAM version.
> 
> The 404 patch should be reactivated for the moment (until we sort out
> where this comes from).


OK, agreed.

I think I'll keep the PAM files for chage and user* and group* as well
as newusers anyway. They will be temporarily useless, but will be
needed in the future. We *have* to sort this issue out and have these
utilities use PAM in order to not fork too much from upstream.