[Pkg-shadow-devel] Bug#330420: login: Breaks system-wide maildir spools

[Nicolas François]

Hi!

Another summary (after the discussion with a PAM maintainer):

MAIL_DIR, MAIL_FILE and QMAILDIR were used to set the MAIL variable in su
and login.
The goal is now to let to PAM the responsibility of the MAIL environment
variable (1. in Henrique mail).

The problem is now that useradd, userdel and usermod need to know where is
the user's mailspool (that's the reason why MAIL_DIR and MAIL_FILE exist
in login.defs currently).

I discussed with Steve Langasek (one of the Debian PAM maintainers) on
IRC, and there doesn't seems to be a practical way to know how PAM will
set this variable for a given user.
(The best way was to parse the pam_mail line, and maybe the pam_env
configuration file, and to pray if there is another (e.g. a proprietary)
pam module that set this variable...)

So we will provide a new variable, in /etc/default/useradd, which will be
used by useradd, userdel and usermod (the variable will have the save
default value /usr/include/paths.h:_PATH_MAILDIR ("/var/mail")).

We could later add options to the user* utilities to specify different
values.

I will work on this ASAP.

Kind Regards,
-- 
Nekral