Bug#293492: [Pkg-shadow-devel] Bug#293492: useradd: by default creates user with unspecified shell, this causes problems

[Christian Perrier]

> Sorry, I was semi-offline because of problems with my e-mail
> urgent job and a business trip to France.

Dammit. And you didn't tell you were coming close to us? :-)

> 
> I agree with you that the latter way is preferred.
> 
> So I'll make the necessary changes.
> 
> What I dislike, however, is presence of e.g.
>   "DSHELL=/bin/bash"
> in /etc/adduser.conf and other variables that bear
> common sense for adduser and useradd.


I see the following rationale here:

adduser is the recommended way to add regular users on Debian
systems. As bash is the default shell on Debian, it seems logical to
me that adduser proposes it as the defalt shell for users.

useradd is, as we often said, a lower level utility, so on Debian is
is aimed to be used as a very generic way to add users. Being generic,
it should rather default to a generic shell.

Anyway, if ones feels there is a bug, it rather pertains to
adduser. I'm deeply against using DSHELL=/bin/bash in
/etc/default/useradd