[Pkg-shadow-devel] Bug#110516: adduser: bad interaction with NIS

[Chris Hofstaedtler]

Hi,

On Wed, Jul 06, 2022 at 04:19:40PM +0200, Marc Haber wrote:
> I am handing over this 18 year old bug to you since this looks like it's
> actually an issue in passwd tools. adduser has to my knowledge never
> interacted with NIS.

Thanks.

> Chances are that the issue has been fixed in passwd since 2004. But not
> having clue at all about NIS, I would kindly ask you as the passwd team
> to verify and, if so, close this bug.

AFAICT there is no bug (in passwd). The passwd tools fail if you ask
them to add or delete a user that is (already) present on the
system, but not in the local user database.

>From my PoV, the request that was made is just invalid. If users
want to have multiple sources of users, they need to use the tools
of the respective source to manage them.

If NIS breaks this, that's a NIS design bug.

As was already established before in this mail thread, individual
Debian packages should allocate user ids in the well known, defined
in policy regions, and system administrators need to set up their
systems in a way respecting the policy. If an individual Debian
package doesn't follow policy in this regard, that is a bug in that
package.

I'm inclined to close this bug.

Best,
Chris