Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: enewuser should force updates to shell and home

[Samuli Suominen <ssuominen@gentoo.org>]

On 06/13/2012 09:18 PM, Mike Gilbert wrote:
> On 6/13/2012 12:00 PM, Ian Stakenvicius wrote:
>> Hey all - I'd like to propose that enewuser forces updates to a user's
>> home dir and shell whenever it is called, so that if this changes with
>> new versions of an ebuild it is dealt with automatically rather than
>> having to modify them in pkg_postinst/pkg_setup directly.
>>
>
> Can you give an example of a case where modifying the home directory
> and/or shell is necessary? I don't really understand how this is useful.

package-1.2.3.ebuild creates user foobard with group foobard and sets 
home to /dev/null

bug gets filed against package-1.2.3.ebuild that foobard needs a home or 
it won't execute itself, and the maintainer changes the home to be 
/var/lib/foobard in package-1.2.3-r1.ebuild

no change happens to passwd and the package continues to fail to run at all

like http://bugs.gentoo.org/420269

sed -i -e '/^foobard/s:/dev/null:/var/lib/foobard' "${ROOT}"/etc/passwd 
in pkg_postinst() doesn't seem very nice solution :/

>
> Also, grobian raised a good point in that the sysadmin may have changed
> it manually. It might be better to ewarn and make the user deal with it.
>

i'd prefer argument to force the update, when the problem hits something 
that 99,98% of users have installed, like sys-auth/polkit, an ewarn is 
not adequate

- Samuli