On Thu, 2005-03-31 at 23:20 +0200, Jeroen van Wolffelaar wrote: > On Thu, Mar 31, 2005 at 11:13:39PM +0200, Tilman Koschnick wrote: > > On Thu, 2005-03-31 at 22:47 +0200, Jeroen van Wolffelaar wrote: > > > Ugh, no. Do *not* remove users on purge, it's reason for all kinds of > > > problems, amongst others that you can never assure all files owned by > > > that user are removed, and therefore leaving userless files on the > > > system. You can't even do a global find, because some partitions can > > > happen to not be mounted, or others are in fact very slow tape robots. > > > > > > Leave the deletion of obsolete users up to the system administrator, do > > > not do so on purge. > > > > What about small daemons that don't generate any files and don't require > > anything apart from what's in the package? > > In general, you cannot assume that the administator doesn't use the user > for other stuff too, related (or not) to the package. An extra user > entry really doesn't hurt anything, so can safely be left.
I thought that was kind of the destinction between remove and purge. Purge tries to remove as much as the package scripts actually can - if the administrator didn't add anything, this would mean everything. If the administrator wants related stuff to stay around, they just remove a package. If they want to purge a package, they should take care of removing anything they added on top as well. What are the implications of userless files? What kind of problem do they pose? I guess one problem would be if a new user is generated with the same id, they would own the leftover files... Not good, I agree. Cheers, Til -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
