[OE-core] Living without shadow

Mike Looijmans mike.looijmans at topic.nl
Fri May 16 15:04:39 UTC 2014


Any package that wants to add user accounts (e.g. dbus) automatically 
installs the "shadow" package into the image. This appears to be done by 
adduser.bbclass.

We want to keep it small, and can easily live without the shadow 
package. Busybox already provides adduser and similar commands, and also 
handles login etc. just fine. So I tried adding a line
RPROVIDES_busybox+="shadow"
to the busybox recipe. I would expect to have an alternative provider 
now, and no more forces installation of the big shadow.

The result was much more surprising though. Letting busybox provide 
"shadow" resulted in failing to build the rootfs. The "adduser" command 
did not work on the host. This was very unexpected - does shadow deliver 
something into the sysroot that adduser.bbclass needs?

How can I get rid of the shadow package?

-- 
Mike Looijmans



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