Re: [gentoo-dev] Use acct-* for qmail users

[Michael Orlitzky <mjo@gentoo.org>]

On 9/10/19 4:25 PM, Rolf Eike Beer wrote:
> 
> I'm not entirely sure. It's what qmail always has done and what the eclass 
> also did.
> 

This is suggested by the qmail documentation,

  http://lifewithqmail.org/lwq.html#create-users

...but goes back to at least 1998, and likely earlier. I grepped the
source and don't see any obvious uses of $HOME. It was probably
suggested by DJB simply because it's a directory, and guaranteed to
exist on the various platforms that qmail supported at the time.

It would be best if someone who runs qmail could change them all to
/dev/null and see if anything breaks. The home directory is already
unwritable, and none of the users have shells, so I'm optimistic.

At present, the following code is repeated six times,

  ACCT_USER_HOME=/var/qmail
  ACCT_USER_HOME_OWNER=root:qmail
  ACCT_USER_HOME_PERMS=0755
  ACCT_USER_GROUPS=( nofiles )

and you have to keep them in sync for eternity. It would be less
error-prone if you could create that directory (and /var/qmail/alias)
only once, in the qmail ebuild, since that's the package that uses those
directories.