[systemd-devel] sysusers and login.defs checks

[Lennart Poettering]

On Mon, 21.07.14 15:43, Lennart Poettering (lennart at poettering.net) wrote:

> > While I appreciate sysusers is intended primarily for bootstrapping
> > /etc, I guess the general consensus is to move package pre/post scripts
> > over to use sysusers instead anyway. Thus the tool should really check
> > /etc/login.defs at runtime if it's present before falling back to its
> > defaults. Those defaults could be set from a compile time check of
> > login.defs too.
> 
> I am pretty strongly against this. Making this administrator
> configurable apepars very wrong, this really should be a decision for
> the distribution vendor, and that's it.  We shouldn't design a system
> that comes to completely different results if you boot it up with and
> without /etc populated...

Here's another idea: maybe we can bind this to the "users" group. Many
distributions (not all...) have this group and add regular users to
it. Maybe that's what we should use on top of the numeric UID boundary
check: if some user is either >= 1000 or is a member of the "users"
group we will consider him or her a regular user instead of a system
user. In many cases this should magically make things work. And even where
this isn't sufficient we at least have a nice solution to tell people:
make your user a member of "users" and it will properly be recognised as
regular user.

Happy to add a patch for this!

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering, Red Hat