[gentoo-embedded] Adding new users when using buildroot?

[gentoo-embedded] Adding new users when using buildroot?

[Ed W]

Hi, I am building a small buildroot using say:

ROOT=/var/embedded/builds/base1 PORTAGE_CONFIGROOT=/var/embedded/portage 
emerge -v dropbear

The end result seems to be that I get my new user added to the build 
system, but not to the ROOT= system.  I have seen a few people report 
issues when using packages, but is this just a known limitation of 
recent portage or do I need some other commandline incantations?

Obviously plenty of other ways to solve this, but curious if there is a 
solution within the portage build process?

Thanks

Ed W

Re: [gentoo-embedded] Adding new users when using buildroot?

[Ned Ludd]

On Fri, 2009-09-04 at 18:18 +0100, Ed W wrote:
> Hi, I am building a small buildroot using say:
> 
> ROOT=/var/embedded/builds/base1 PORTAGE_CONFIGROOT=/var/embedded/portage 
> emerge -v dropbear
> 
> The end result seems to be that I get my new user added to the build 
> system, but not to the ROOT= system.  I have seen a few people report 
> issues when using packages, but is this just a known limitation of 
> recent portage or do I need some other commandline incantations?
> 
> Obviously plenty of other ways to solve this, but curious if there is a 
> solution within the portage build process?


buildroot is not the best term to use when refering to
portage/gentoo/embedded. It just confuses people. 
Reason being.. http://buildroot.org/


As for users not being added in $ROOT. Yes you are right and sadly this
is a known limitation of portage/pam/and friends right now.


-- 
Ned Ludd <solar@gentoo.org>
Gentoo Linux

Re: [gentoo-embedded] Adding new users when using buildroot?

[Sven Rebhan]

2009/9/4 Ed W <lists@wildgooses.com>:
> Obviously plenty of other ways to solve this, but curious if there is a
> solution within the portage build process?

I don't know of any standard way. Portage uses 'useradd' to generate
the new user
and this command does _not_ support a ROOT. The only (non-standard) way to
add a new user is by directly writing to /etc/passwd, but I'm not sure
if this works
on all OSes supported by Gentoo.

Anyway, if you follow http://gentoo.mindzoo.de/index.cgi/wiki/Cross%20Install
you will find the command

find /var/db/pkg -name '*.ebuild' -exec grep -qF 'pkg_postinst()' {}
\; -exec ebuild {} postinst \;

which reruns all postinstall sections of your cross-compiled system on
the target
and thus also creates the users.

Have fun!

    Sven

Re: [gentoo-embedded] Adding new users when using buildroot?

[Ed W]

Sven Rebhan wrote:
> Anyway, if you follow http://gentoo.mindzoo.de/index.cgi/wiki/Cross%20Install
> you will find the command
>
> find /var/db/pkg -name '*.ebuild' -exec grep -qF 'pkg_postinst()' {}
> \; -exec ebuild {} postinst \;
>
> which reruns all postinstall sections of your cross-compiled system on
> the target
> and thus also creates the users.
>   


That seems like a good idea, but I think the docs say that user creation 
should be in pkg_setup() and certainly this is the case with dropbear?  
Seems a bit dangerous to re-run pkg_setup for every package...?

I also noticed that since I have only busybox in my final build and it's 
got pretty lousy support for adduser I may need to inject directly into 
/etc/

Actually the docs here 
http://devmanual.gentoo.org/ebuild-writing/users-and-groups/index.html 
suggest that this IS supposed to work inside the sandbox and hence we 
might reasonably expect it to work with ROOT= set.  However, as Ned 
says, it seems not to work right now...

Oh well

Thanks

Ed W