On Mon 19 Aug 2019 at 09:17:21 (-0400), Greg Wooledge wrote: > On Fri, Aug 16, 2019 at 11:03:48PM -0400, Kenneth Parker wrote: > > >From looking at an Ubuntu 16.04 System I administer, User "man" (uid 6) is, > > apparently the owner of /var/cache/man, which appears to be an area for > > translating man pages. Who creates this User? > > I don't know about Ubuntu, because this is debian-user. In Debian, > the preinst script for the base-passwd package will create a bunch > of system users if /etc/passwd is not present, and groups if /etc/group > is not present. > > See /var/lib/dpkg/info/base-passwd.preinst for details. > > One might ponder under what conditions, exactly, this script would be > executed while these files are not yet present. I don't know the inner > workings of the debian-installer, so I'm not sure whether this is just > a safety net, or an expected part of a normal system installation.
base-passwd is the first package installed at "Install the base system" which follows "Partition disks", so it would normally expect to be installed into an empty partition. I should add, though, that it gets re-unpacked, re-installed and set up a few seconds later, when about a score of other packages have been set up. I would assume a preinst script would run on the first occurrence. What's odd to me is that the base-passwd preinst file has two Here documents which duplicate its /usr/share/base-passwd/*master files. Perhaps ok for files that only change on a time-scale of decades, but I wonder why the /etc versions are not just copied from the masters. Cheers, David.
