[Pkg-shadow-devel] Bug#584868: passwd: userdel removes the group with the same name as 'username'

[Teodor]

Package: passwd
Version: 1:4.1.4.2-1
Severity: important
Tags: sid lenny

Hi,

I've removed the 'staff' username and the group 'staff' was also removed. This has
happened on a Lenny system, on a 'sid/testing' system the group was not removed
due to this reason:
| root at frost:~# tail /etc/passwd
| [..]
| staff:x:1002:1001:Company staff:/home/staff:/bin/bash
| customer:x:1003:1001:Company customers:/home/customer:/bin/bash
| root at frost:~# userdel -r staff
| userdel: group staff is the primary group of another user and is not removed.
| root at frost:~# userdel -r customer

Still, both 'staff' and 'customer' were having the group 'partners' which was not
removed after were executions:
| root at frost:~# getent group partners
| partners:x:1001:

I'm marking this bug with severity important, but it could be 'critical' due to the
fact that a custom username with the same name as a system group could cause the
system group deletion and thus break the system.

Thanks


-- System Information:
Debian Release: squeeze/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.32-5-686 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages passwd depends on:
ii  debianutils                   3.2.3      Miscellaneous utilities specific t
ii  libc6                         2.10.2-9   Embedded GNU C Library: Shared lib
ii  libpam-modules                1.1.1-3    Pluggable Authentication Modules f
ii  libpam0g                      1.1.1-3    Pluggable Authentication Modules l
ii  libselinux1                   2.0.94-1   SELinux runtime shared libraries

passwd recommends no packages.

passwd suggests no packages.

-- Configuration Files:
/etc/default/useradd changed:
SHELL=/bin/sh


-- no debconf information