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

[Nicolas François]

Hello,

On Thu, Jul 28, 2011 at 06:20:21AM +0000, Adam M. Costello wrote:
> 
> 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/.

How did shadow behave before this change?

I think that it could read successfully the files, but then it probably
destroyed the links every time a change was committed.

I would expect the same behavior from PAM when passwords are changed.

Maybe under those conditions it's better to explicitly not support such
setup and fail.

Best Regards,
-- 
Nekral