[Pkg-shadow-devel] Bug#1100563: should accept --uid/gid between 60000 and 64999 for system users

[Marc Haber]

Package: passwd
Version: 1:4.17.3-1
Severity: important

That's an Oops. This should probably be fixed before trixie.

Debian allocates static UIDs/GIDs for packages in the range between
60000 and 64999. While this can be requested with adduser --system --uid
64010, for example, this triggers a warning from useradd:

useradd warning: swift's uid 64010 is greater than SYS_UID_MAX 999

A statically allocated UID reserved for a package qualifies our
definition of a "system user". useradd should not barf on this.

Adduser has to follow suit and probably adapt to your decision as the
passwd maintainer. Adduser would really not prefer to throw useradd's
warnings to /dev/null to silence this. I would appreciate if this
warning could be suppressed for the static system UID range defined in
Debian Policy chapter 9.2.2

Greetings
Marc