[Pkg-shadow-devel] Bug#600755: Autologin fails with login from shadow > 4.1.3.1

[Frank Peters]

Package: login
Version: 4.1.4
Severity: normal

My system is Gentoo, but Gentoo uses the shadow package that is
maintained by Debian and it is appropriate to make a report here.

I have been using the following autologin procedure on my machine
to avoid passwords for some time without problems:

http://www.gentoo-wiki.info/TIP_Passwordless_Login

However, using any version of shadow greater than 4.1.3.1 causes
this autologin procedure to fail.  The system will only hang
at boot and there are no errors logged.

The trouble begins with login from shadow-4.1.4.  Any login taken from
shadow-4.1.3.1 or earlier allows the autologin procedure to succeed.

There have been some changes to the login program that may cause
this problem and it may be related to PAM.  I do not use PAM on my
system.

A bug report was filed on the Gentoo bug tracker (https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=324419) but this is definitely an upstream issue and needs to be reported
to the Debian list.

Frank Peters