Hi,

the Debian Science team has packaged node-shiny-server[1].
It creates a system user in its postinst script. I've added
some debug output to this script[2] since I wanted to debug
a piuparts issue which you can see here in salsa CI[3].

This log shows two ways to verify that the home directory
of the user does not exist, but adduser fails with

Stopped: Couldn't create home directory `/home/shiny': File exists.

anyway.

Any idea what's going on here and how to fix this?

Kind regards

Andreas.

[1] https://salsa.debian.org/science-team/shiny-server
[2] https://salsa.debian.org/science-team/shiny-server
[3] https://salsa.debian.org/science-team/node-shiny-server/-/jobs/2785645#L5900

--
http://fam-tille.de

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Hi,

On Fri, 2022-05-20 at 09:37 +0200, Andreas Tille wrote:

the Debian Science team has packaged node-shiny-server[1].
It creates a system user in its postinst script. I've added
some debug output to this script[2] since I wanted to debug
a piuparts issue which you can see here in salsa CI[3].

This log shows two ways to verify that the home directory
of the user does not exist, but adduser fails with

Stopped: Couldn't create home directory `/home/shiny': File
exists.

anyway.

Any idea what's going on here and how to fix this?

It seems wrong for a system user to use a directory below /home.

Ansgar

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Hi Andreas e.a.,

On Fri, May 20, 2022 at 09:43:50AM +0200, Ansgar wrote:

On Fri, 2022-05-20 at 09:37 +0200, Andreas Tille wrote:

the Debian Science team has packaged node-shiny-server[1].
It creates a system user in its postinst script. I've added
some debug output to this script[2] since I wanted to debug
a piuparts issue which you can see here in salsa CI[3].

This log shows two ways to verify that the home directory
of the user does not exist, but adduser fails with

Stopped: Couldn't create home directory `/home/shiny': File
exists.

anyway.

Any idea what's going on here and how to fix this?

It seems wrong for a system user to use a directory below /home.

Yup, see also https://lintian.debian.org/tags/maintainer-script-lacks-home-in-adduser

In
https://wiki.debian.org/AccountHandlingInMaintainerScripts
there are some ideas; I believe there is not yet final consensus in Debian on how to deal with adduser in maintainer scripts...

Anyway HTH, Bye,

Joost

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Hi,

On Fri, 2022-05-20 at 09:58 +0200, Joost van Baal-Ilić wrote:

Yup, see also https://lintian.debian.org/tags/maintainer-script-lacks-home-in-adduser

Just a quick FYI: this will have real consequences in the next release
of adduser; system accounts created without --home will be set to
/nonexistent.

Cheers,
Matt

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On Mon, Jun 06, 2022 at 06:41:18PM -0400, Matt Barry wrote:

On Fri, 2022-05-20 at 09:58 +0200, Joost van Baal-Ilić wrote:

Yup, see also https://lintian.debian.org/tags/maintainer-script-lacks-home-in-adduser

Just a quick FYI: this will have real consequences in the next release
of adduser; system accounts created without --home will be set to /nonexistent.

Also, a row of bug reports have been created for adduser in result of
the discussion that was initiated on debian-devel earlier this year. And
there are real people, such as Matt, working on them, so adduser is
going to get better.

There is also a wishlist bug against policy clarifying account
management in maintainer scripts.

The bug reports also give a pretty good overview about what adduser will
do, so interested package maintainers are invited to sift through them
and maybe adapt their maintainer scripts.

In addition, as one of the adduser maintainers, I am open to questions
and suggestions.

Greetings
Marc

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