Ubuntu
gnome-system-tools package

  1. Bug #488913
  2. Comment #0

Comment 0 for bug 488913

Revision history for this message
ceg (ceg) wrote : users-admin defaults to override system wide defaults from /etc/login.defs, /adduser.conf

Binary package hint: gnome-system-tools

splitting this from #488158

>we implement user profiles in users-admin. Those allow the distribution/admin to present users with typical account types, which set sensible default values for home dir, shell, groups membership (esp. admin)

Nothing wrong with those, because adduser is used and say EXTRA_GROUPS defined in /etc/adduser.conf will be honored, right.

> and UID.

With this however I believe that any tool should *default to* leave the assignment of numerical IDs to be the responsibility of the system (it's part of the stuff that gets tweaked centrally in /etc/login.defs and /etc/adduser.conf)

>It's kind of silly we implement [user profiles] on the GUI side, but as we can't be sure the distribution supports this kind of feature (and none does ATM)

Its probably ok if profiles are not supported otherwise and its easier then submitting a patch.

>All I can do for now is have a look at the profiles handling code so that when no profiles are set, we don't specify any UID, and the backends leave adduser decide for us. Not very hard, but our protocol does not support it ATM.

Great. And its propably all that would be needed. Together with removing the settings that overide system defauls from the shipped profiles. (i.e. have empty uid-min=, uid-max=, home-prefix= and shell= lines ; since those should have sensible system defaults)

(OT: Of course a patch to useradd -D or adduser to support different profiles would still be great, too. Single profile definition and configuration code is available in adduser.local. The doc is on any debian/ubuntu system file:///usr/share/doc/adduser/examples/README )