On Sat, Dec 18, 2021 at 12:51:56PM -0500, Jason Franklin wrote: > Greetings: > > I am a developer who is new to making contributions to Debian. Most of > my work so far has been focused on making improvements to the "adduser" > package. Of course, bug triage is one of the first things on which I am > trying to show progress. > > On the relevant BTS page, I came across this bug: > > https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=152195 > > A summary of this bug is below... > > # adduser --system --no-create-home foo > # getent passwd foo > foo:x:130:65534::/home/foo:/usr/sbin/nologin > > As you can see, "/home/foo" is named as the new user's home directory, > but that directory is not created due to the "--no-create-home" option. > > This was reported many years ago and was given the "wontfix" tag. I > believe this should be reversed since Debian policy now has this to > say... > > > https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-opersys.html#non-existent-home-directories > > I hope to see that, whenever possible, the "adduser" tools conform to > Debian Policy when managing the addition and removal of users and > groups.
This seems to be a misunderstanding of the purpose of --no-create-home. This option does not say that the user does not have a home directory, but that it should not be created by adduser, and instead will be create later by some other procedure, for example by setting pam_mkhomedir to create it on first login, or by mounting a NFS filesystem on /home, etc. In this bug report, users used --no-create-home but failed to create the home directory themselves. It seems that what they wanted to do was '--home /nonexistent' I would suggest you add an option --no-homedir that do '--home /nonexistent' or whatever is appropriate and close this bug. Or you can close this bug without adding a new option. It mostly have hostorical value now. Cheers, Bill.
