Comment 4 for bug 488158

Revision history for this message
ceg (ceg) wrote : Re: users-admin not following Debian policy

Concerning the UPG group membership: As it is not necessary (and redundant) and gives problems I believe users should not be made members of their main groups.

As a result of adding the user to its main group deluser thinks the primary group is not one adduser has created automatically as a user private group (UPG) but a manually added group. So the empty group will not be deleted automatically.

However if it truly is a UPG (created off record by users-admin) but is not being deleted together with the user, this in turn may very quickly lead to UPG accounts with primary GID != UID (when a user has been deleted before). Only if, of course, the adduser UID allocation algrithm is implemented in such a way that it does not skip UIDs with taken GIDs, or the calling program makes that decision. (May this be an issue for users-admin or adduser? May need fixing then, the same thing might happen as soon as a group is created manually.)

(Let me stress that my feedback here is merely from a admin/users point of view, not of any knowledge from adduser or useradd which it in turn I believe depends on.)

FYI: I was editing the (UPG) related wiki page https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MultiUserManagement when I got to users-admin. You may like to have a look at. Those kind of informations might be interesting for any users-admin user, and good for its help or wizard texts?