[oe] adduser question

[Phil Blundell]

On Sat, 2008-11-29 at 18:08 +0100, Koen Kooi wrote:
> adduser --system adds UIDs <100 to /etc/passwd, which 'update-passwd' 
> will blow away, since they aren't in /usr/share/base-passwd/passwd.master
> 
> Is this intended behaviour, and if not, how should it get fixed?

Whether or not to use passwd.master and update-passwd is clearly a
distribution choice.  Any distro which does want to use a
centrally-administered master password file should, presumably, also
configure adduser with an appropriate system UID range (for example,
100-999).  Depending on what implementation of adduser you are using,
this might just be a case of adjusting adduser.conf or it might involve
a recompile.

For distros which don't desire to use passwd.master, the right solution
is simply to refrain from installing or running update-passwd.  In this
case it doesn't matter what UID range adduser is set up for.

p.