[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#968400: cockpit-ws: Warning on upgrades

[Cesare Leonardi]

Package: cockpit-ws
Version: 225-1
Severity: normal

Hello.
For several cockpit releases, on every package upgrade there are two
repeated messages:
------
Setting up cockpit-ws (225-1) ...
Warning: The home dir /nonexisting you specified can't be accessed: No such file or directory
The system user `cockpit-ws' already exists. Exiting.
Warning: The home dir /nonexisting you specified can't be accessed: No such file or directory
The system user `cockpit-wsinstance' already exists. Exiting.
------

Leaving behind the cockpit-ws user already exists message (I guess it
could be silenced with a test), the /nonexisting warning is what caught
my attention. Not because it doesn't exists but because Debian seems to
use a similar but different path for the same purpose. For example on
my system I see that:
------
# cat /etc/passwd | grep nonexist
nobody:x:65534:65534:nobody:/nonexistent:/usr/sbin/nologin
_apt:x:118:65534::/nonexistent:/bin/false
debian-h2o:x:119:135::/nonexistent:/usr/sbin/nologin
tcpdump:x:121:140::/nonexistent:/usr/sbin/nologin
libvirtdbus:x:999:999::/nonexistent:/usr/sbin/nologin
cockpit-ws:x:117:131::/nonexisting:/usr/sbin/nologin
cockpit-wsinstance:x:125:142::/nonexisting:/usr/sbin/nologin
------

Look, here cockpit is the only one using /nonexisting as home path.
I don't know if there are any Debian policies talking about this path
and its usage but from what I see, cockpit seems to deviate from the
rest of the system.

Cesare.


-- System Information:
Debian Release: bullseye/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 5.7.0-2-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU threads)
Locale: LANG=it_IT.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=it_IT.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages cockpit-ws depends on:
ii  adduser             3.118
ii  glib-networking     2.64.3-2
ii  libc6               2.31-3
ii  libcrypt1           1:4.4.16-1
ii  libglib2.0-0        2.64.4-1
ii  libgnutls30         3.6.14-2+b1
ii  libgssapi-krb5-2    1.17-10
ii  libjson-glib-1.0-0  1.4.4-2
ii  libkrb5-3           1.17-10
ii  libpam0g            1.3.1-5
ii  libsystemd0         246-2
ii  openssl             1.1.1g-1
ii  systemd             246-2

cockpit-ws recommends no packages.

Versions of packages cockpit-ws suggests:
pn  sssd-dbus  <none>

-- no debconf information