Comment 20 for bug 908140

OK, it won't be as simple as grabbing those patches. There are two problems here: (1) should we treat users < MIN_UID as system users or not and (2) handling a logged in system user better.

Presumably these reports from 999 users are people that somehow created a <MIN_UID user that they did not think was a system user. So if we fix (1) by fixing how we identify system users (like upstream did by looking at login shells instead), (2) is a lower priority.

But for some reason, many of Ubuntu's system users have reasonable shells like /bin/sh or /bin/bash. So if we simply use the upstream patches, we'll get a whole bunch of system users being misidentified as normal users.

I looked back at pre-3.0 GDM, and we had patched it to respect MIN_UID. So I guess on Ubuntu, MIN_UID is a valid method of determining system users. Which means we don't need to worry about grabbing those upstream patches (and note that when we do, we need to patch it to respect MIN_UID again).

This implies that the users that reported this crash were doing something 'unsupported' by treating a <MIN_UID user as a normal user.

Thus to fix this, we have to properly fix problem (2) and better handle the situation of having a logged in system user. This means having gnome-control-center handle being run under a user that isn't in accountsservice (or, at least not crash).