Re: [gentoo-user] Emerge with --root option : users not created

[Willie Wong <wwong@math.princeton.edu>]

On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 02:02:22PM +0100, Penguin Lover Shinkan squawked:
> I wanted to submit this as a bug on bugzilla, but I must be sure there is
> nothing that I miss.
> 
> Let's say I have a /target dir.
> If I do 'emerge --root=/target <someport>' (cross-emerge), and that
> <someport> is supposed to create users (like vixie-cron, clamav or many
> others), users are not created on /target. I can verify that by chrooting on
> /target and making something that requires this user (such as launching
> clamd for clamav), or simply by looking at /target/etc/passwd to see that
> there's no expected users.
> 
> Am I missing somethings or is this really a bug ?
> 

If you don't get a better answer here, you should ask the embedded
group. But I think it maybe a bug:

Looking at eutils.eclass, in function enewuser, it explicitly checks
for whether the shell specified is available in ${ROOT}, but when it
comes time to create the actual user, it calls the system useradd,
which I think will add the user to /etc, and not ${ROOT}/etc...

Though, I cannot right now think of how to actually change it so that
it will create the appropriate accounts in a modified ${ROOT}. AFAIK
useradd does not support this. It may require re-implementing useradd
in portage? Which will just be silly. 

Perhaps ${ROOT} is not designed to be used the way you intend to use
it? It looks like you are building embedded or cross-compiled, right?
Maybe a work-around is to do everything in a CHROOT? 

Anyway, ask gentoo-embedded to see if there's any work arounds, and
maybe ask gentoo-dev to clarify on what $ROOT is used for? 

Cheers, 

W
-- 
A plateau is a high form of flattery.
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