Christian Kurz and I apparently have a fundamental disagreement on issues
relating to the bug report I submitted. I am going to try to summarize my
position in the form of a number of suggestions. Please, think about what I
say here. For all the heat and disagreement between Christian and I, he has
helped pinpoint the precise source of the problem and caused me to give
considerable thought to the policies behind it. No reply is requested, and
you may close out the bug report at your discretion with no objection from
me. We all have many other things which require our time, and I'm taking
time from a much-anticipated hiking date with my daughter to write this.
The problem appears to have originated with changes made by the
update-passwd program which I apparently approved as part of a general
update from Debian 2.1 to 2.2. The update changed the home directory for
the majordomo list server in /etc/passwd and caused the list server to
break.
1. The onscreen install dialog for the update and the man page are
insufficiently cautionary with regard to possible system damage which
may result from from accepting proposed changes. I submitted suggested
wording for a strong warning message in my previous post. Such a
warning would be consistent with those currently issued by other Debian
update scripts and programs, and would improve the friendliness and
usability of the distribution.
2. The entry for user majordom in the base template for /etc/passwd should
be removed. The Majordomo list server is no longer distributed with
Debian and overwriting the home directory for what must now be a manual
install is almost certain to break the list server. Christian has
suggested that I submit a separate bug report on this and I will do so,
although this post is apparently reaching the package maintainer
responsible for this.
3. Proper Unix system administrative procedure for any script or process
which modifies so important a file as /etc/passwd requires that a
backtrace of some sort be generated, either in the form of backup files
or a diff saved to disk, or some other method of reverting the file in
case of problems. update-passwd apparently doesn't do this.
4. It may be properly questioned whether or not the update-passwd program
really serves any useful purpose, except perhaps an advisory one.
Packages which require system entries in /etc/passwd can resonably be
expected to make them as part of their installs, and culling or changing
entries made manually in support of non-Debian installs (such as
Majordomo or Qmail) can result in breakage. This is not for me to
decide, but my hope is that this will reach people who will give the
matter serioius thought.
A typical upgrade from Debian 2.1 to 2.2 involves well over 100M if packages
and takes several hours to do properly. On a production system, this
requires any number of customer-critical facilities to be down for some
period of this time, and quick decision making re. the many questions asked
during the install is important. Many Debian packages provide good warnings
and and notices about possible problems as a result of changes being made.
One may resonably expect this level of dialog to be consistent throughout
the install process. Such was not the case here.
This post is intended to be constructive and to stimulate some thought and
discussion at your end in pursuit of improving Debian, which remains my
favorite Linux distribution. I don't have the personal bandwidth to pursue
the matter further with Christian or anyone else on the list. If any of you
have questions about the above I will be pleased to answer them, but I don't
want to (and will not) debate issues of policy or blame any further.
Thank you for your attention, such as it is and what there is of it :)
--
Lindsay Haisley | "Everything works | PGP public key
FMP Computer Services | if you let it" | available at
[EMAIL PROTECTED] | (The Roadie) | <http://www.fmp.com/pubkeys>
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