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

[Marc Haber]

Hi,

On Sat, May 07, 2005 at 09:56:27PM +0300, Alexander Gattin wrote:
> 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 you : 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.
> 
> I spent some time during previous week to look at
> useradd in other unices.

Good work, thanks.

> What resembles what, that's the question! ;)

There is not too much resemblance. I think that we could reduce our
goal to make GNU userland systems like the Linuxes to behave the same,
so we shouldn't patch our shadow to make it do different things than
it does on SuSE or Redhat.

> So, except fixing this behaviour, do you want userdel
> to output a warning when it can't delete a group,
> because it has members/is primary for someone else, for
> example?

I don't care too much about that. Just do what you find sensible.

In my opinion, it would be nice if adduser could either complete the
operation to its end, or not even start it. Leaving a job half done is
bad, IMO. How I accomplish that can be decided once your change has
been done.

Greetings
Marc

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