[Pkg-shadow-devel] Bug#635679: useradd and groupadd fail if /etc/passwd and /etc/group are symlinks

[Adam M. Costello]

Package: passwd
Version: 1:4.1.4.2+svn3283-3
Severity: normal

Until revision 3095 in the upstream svn, useradd and groupadd worked
just fine if /etc/passwd and /etc/group were symlinks.  That revision
added the O_NOFOLLOW flag to open() in lib/commonio.c, and now those
tools fail to open /etc/passwd and /etc/group if they are symlinks.  I
don't use those tools myself, but Debian package installation scripts
seem to use them.  Can we go back to allowing symlinks?  My system
for managing my three Debian installations is based on keeping all my
customizations in a separate directory, with symlinks from /etc/.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: wheezy/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (900, 'testing'), (800, 'stable'), (600, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.32-5-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_US, LC_CTYPE=en_US (charmap=ISO-8859-1)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages passwd depends on:
ii  debianutils                   4.0.2      Miscellaneous utilities specific t
ii  libc6                         2.13-10    Embedded GNU C Library: Shared lib
ii  libpam-modules                1.1.3-2    Pluggable Authentication Modules f
ii  libpam0g                      1.1.3-2    Pluggable Authentication Modules l
ii  libselinux1                   2.0.98-1.1 SELinux runtime shared libraries

passwd recommends no packages.

passwd suggests no packages.

-- debconf information:
  passwd/password-mismatch:
  passwd/username: local-amc
  passwd/password-empty:
  passwd/make-user: true
  passwd/title:
  passwd/user-uid:
  passwd/shadow: true
  passwd/username-bad:
  passwd/user-fullname: