[Pkg-shadow-devel] should src:adduser, src:shadow and src:base-passwd work together?

[Marc Haber]

Hi,

I apologize for letting this rest for more than two months.

On Sun, Aug 04, 2024 at 02:50:50PM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 04, 2024 at 02:36:10PM +0200, Marc Haber wrote:
> > Would it be a good idea to form a joint effort, maintaining src:adduser,
> > src:shadow and maybe src:base-passwd in more close organization? It
> > would probably make more sense to keep the three packages in their own
> > repositories and as their own source package, but maybe having a joint
> > maintainer address would be a good idea to be able to discuss things
> > like #1077804 easier. The need for coordination between src:adduser and
> > src:shadow has proven itself to be present multiple times in the past.
> 
> I'm not opposed.
> 
> I would say that base-passwd is and should be pretty slow-moving - I've
> always taken the view that it's best not to rush to make changes in
> Essential packages, especially given that I can think of a few cases
> where people thought it would be right to add global static users/groups
> for things and then a couple of years later it became clear that that
> was or would have been a mistake - but it makes sense to have some
> cooperation for anything that touches on user/group naming policy.
> 
> Plus I've been the base-passwd maintainer for more than 20 years now,
> and some kind of team would be healthy.

Giving the face that shadow already has its own mailing list, it would probably
make most sense to unite under the roof of the shadow package.

Since shadow, adduser and base-passwd are exposed security-wise as well, it
would probably make sense to move the three source packages from the Debian
project to its own Salsa project, probably best called shadow-team.

We can then decide together whether to move the Maintainer field of base-passwd
and adduser to pkg-shadow-devel at l.a.d.o as well. Adduser has its Maintainer set
to adduser at p.d.o, so interested parties can subscribe via the tracker, and
shadow has its Maintainer set to the mailing list. This leaves base-passwd
where there currently is no possibility to see maintainer mail like support
requests, bug reports and other issues.

I offer to ask for the shadow-team to be created on salsa, but that does not
make sense until shadow has indicated to go along.

And I also offer to help with base-passwd and act as a backup for you,
Colin.

Greetings
Marc

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