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

[Christian Perrier]

> 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.


This means that, in the meantime, MAIL_DIR and MAIL_FILE only purpose
is giving user* utilities the path to the user's mail spool file (or
mail directory).

As a consequence, we should revise the comment in the default file
which is actually very confusing and does not give clues about the
exact purpose of these variables. For instance, the comment must be
clear enough to show that they have NO responsibility in seeting the
users MAIL environment variables.

# REQUIRED for useradd/userdel/usermdo
#   Directory where mailboxes reside, _or_ name of file, relative to the
#   home directory.  If you _do_ define MAIL_DIR and MAIL_FILE,
#   MAIL_DIR takes precedence.
#
#   Essentially:
#      - MAIL_DIR defines the location of users mail spool files
#        (for mbox use) by appending the username to MAIL_DIR as defined
#        below.  
#      - MAIL_FILE defines the location of the users mail spool files as the
#        fully-qualified filename obtained by prepending the user home
#        directory before $MAIL_FILE
#
# NOTE: This is no more used for setting up users MAIL environment variable
#       which is, starting from shadow 4.0.12-1 in Debian, entirely the
#       job of the pam_mail PAM modules
#       See default PAM configuration files provided for
#       login, su, etc.
# 
# This is a transitory situation: setting these variables will soon
# move to /etc/default/useradd and the variables will then be
# no more supported
MAIL_DIR        /var/mail
#MAIL_FILE      .mail

This probably deserves a special entry in NEWS.Debian.

When we will release a version implementing the move to
/etc/default/useradd, we will probably need to make the transition as
smooth as possible.

This could include an automated copy of these settings to the system's
/etc/default/useradd file (of course ONLY when the variables do NOT
already exist there) which could be done in the package config scripts.


Henrique, comments?