Bug#1056166: systemd-homed: `passwd` fails

[Sam Hartman]

>>>>> "Luca" == Luca Boccassi <bluca at debian.org> writes:

    Luca> Ah thanks for the pointer to the file, I had missed that
    Luca> somehow in the first reply. I see it now: the pam-config for
    Luca> unix.so assumes that if something runs before then everything
    Luca> is done already.  Unfortunately that assumption is wrong. I'll
    Luca> see if I can just hack it and monkey patch common-password in
    Luca> the postinst to fix it up for now, as I assume this is some
    Luca> load-bearing assumption.

I think if you want to play with it and modify common-password, that's
fine.

I do not think that's appropriate for testing though.

I'm fairly uncomfortable  with a package other than pam touching
common-password in postinst other than through pam-auth-update.
It's fairly unlikely to work and likely to cause problems on upgrade.
I'd be much happier with  (at least for now) simply not auto-configuring
systemd-home and leaving that to the sysadmin.
I appreciate that is not what you want to hear, but:

1) I believe that package a modifying a configuration file of package b
without cooperation of package b is a clear policy violation.

2) common-password is a configuration file of pam.

3) I'd like to understand the situation muchd better and especially why
you need   to be account-type:primary.
I suspect we're going to need to have changes to pam-auth-update.