OK, we've discussed the group naming on #ubuntu-devel and decided that 'admin'
is probably the least bad name for the group. Most of the other obvious names
already have other assigned meanings, and as for the confusion with 'adm', it's
really adm that's misnamed and might one day be renamed. Also, 'admin' is the
naming used by OS X.
However, there are some problems with the current patch:
* It claims gid 80 for itself. This is disallowed; base-passwd is the arbiter
of all gids in the 0-99 range, and base-passwd has never allocated a group
called 'admin' or a group with gid 80. Since a static gid isn't really needed, I
think sudo should just use addgroup --system and pick an arbitrary system gid.
* sudo needs to complain if the admin group already exists, since the
administrator might already be using it for something else.
* There should be a trailing newline in /etc/sudoers.
* "create_default_suoders" typo. However, I think that function should just go
away entirely; it is no longer relevant, as passwd.config can just add the user
to the admin group and leave it at that. That code is essentially only used on
initial installation.
* Adding the user to the admin group should be guarded by [ -z "$WANT_ROOT_PW" ].
Thanks a lot for the patch; I'm working on integrating it now, and fixing the
issues above at the same time. I should have this done before the Hoary feature
freeze deadline.
OK, we've discussed the group naming on #ubuntu-devel and decided that 'admin'
is probably the least bad name for the group. Most of the other obvious names
already have other assigned meanings, and as for the confusion with 'adm', it's
really adm that's misnamed and might one day be renamed. Also, 'admin' is the
naming used by OS X.
However, there are some problems with the current patch:
* It claims gid 80 for itself. This is disallowed; base-passwd is the arbiter
of all gids in the 0-99 range, and base-passwd has never allocated a group
called 'admin' or a group with gid 80. Since a static gid isn't really needed, I
think sudo should just use addgroup --system and pick an arbitrary system gid.
* sudo needs to complain if the admin group already exists, since the
administrator might already be using it for something else.
* There should be a trailing newline in /etc/sudoers.
* "create_ default_ suoders" typo. However, I think that function should just go
away entirely; it is no longer relevant, as passwd.config can just add the user
to the admin group and leave it at that. That code is essentially only used on
initial installation.
* Adding the user to the admin group should be guarded by [ -z "$WANT_ROOT_PW" ].
Thanks a lot for the patch; I'm working on integrating it now, and fixing the
issues above at the same time. I should have this done before the Hoary feature
freeze deadline.