users-admin tool enforces policy it has no authority over

[Rolf Leggewie]

While some people frown upon capital letters in group names there is nothing in Debian policy that disallows them. Yet, users-admin will refuse to operate on such groups and even throw out incorrect information as in "Please set a valid group name consisting of a lower case letter followed by lower case letters and numbers."

Reference: bug 245791

[Milan Bouchet-Valat (nalimilan)]

I don't remember the rationale for that restriction, if there is one. users-admin is a cross-platform tool, so one would have to check that all platforms allow upper case letters before making such a change. Anyways, the gnome-system-tools are deprecated now, and nobody is working on them, so I don't see this change happening. Users shouldn't have to deal with Unix groups on normal systems - if they do, that's a bug in the relevant packages.

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

Thank you for the ultra-fast response. Whether or not the user should or should not have to deal with user groups on a Unix groups is not really the point the point. The point is that the tool allows access to such mingling and at times gives false information and error messages.

What's the successor to users-admin now?

[Milan Bouchet-Valat (nalimilan)]

The control center "User accounts" applets is the successor, but it doesn't show groups to the user. Ideally, choosing whether users are Admins or Normal should be enough for everything. If people need to user groups, they must be able to use the command line, because only these operations require it anyway (and are only hacks).

users-admin still lives and can be used by admins that would need to set user groups, but it's not really good for that since e.g. it doesn't handle LDAP nor mass configuration. We'd need a tool designed specifically for that...

[Milan Bouchet-Valat (nalimilan)]

BTW, Ubuntu still hasn't packaged the gnome-system-tools 3.0, which were released last spring. So I won't waste my time releasing a fix that would never get included anyway...