[Pkg-shadow-devel] Reconciling conflicts between methods for adding users

[Jason Franklin]

Ricardo:

Thanks for adding more detail here!

On Tue, 2022-02-22 at 20:46 +0100, Ricardo Fraile wrote:
> At the moment, let me clarify the situation with this schema:
> 
> - a "right way" to add a system user from a package
> 
> Statu quo: adduser
> Proposal A: dh_sysuser with adduser as backend ¿or useradd (Bug 
> #981917)?
> Proposal B: dh_installsysusers with systemd-sysusers as backend
> Proposal C: A and B are valid

adduser is definitely still the leader here, by far.

I think this is a reasonable breakdown. However, if Proposal C means
that we have two valid methods, package maintainers will need to take
care to ensure that the same local settings for system users are
respected. That seems burdensome and like a potential source of mistakes
and drift for how different packages do things.

Not sure what others think about this...

> - a "right way" to add a system user from the command line
> 
> Statu quo: adduser and systemd-sysusers
> Proposal: choose one is "inits Debian landmine"

This makes sense. Doing this action from the command line is really more
of a local administrator choice.

However, if people do remain with "adduser" they will benefit from doing
account creation/destruction in the same way that most all packages
currently do it.

> - a "right way" to do low-level user management tasks
> 
> Statu quo: useradd and systemd-sysusers
> Proposal: choose one is "inits Debian landmine"

I suppose this is the correct breakdown too.

It was not my intention to open such a difficult discussion!

I hope this was all well-received!

-- 
Jason Franklin