Subject: Bug#3189: nvi over-cautious about .exrc?

From: [email-masked] (Bruce Perens)
Date: Mon, 3 Jun 96 13:09 PDT

> Maybe we can just change /etc/adduser.conf so that USERGROUPS is off
> by default?  I don't really see the point in enabling this feature
> by default - I've seen no other unix system doing that.  The fewer
> surprises for the new admin, the better...

We settled this argument after a long and sometimes acrimonious discussion
between all of the developers a year or more ago. I'm not willing to revisit
it.

	Thanks

	Bruce
--
Pixar's Toy Story: Over 1/3 Billion dollars world box office so far.

Bruce Perens AB6YM          [email-masked]            http://www.hams.com/

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From: Marek Michalkiewicz <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 3 Jun 1996 23:19:27 +0200 (MET DST)

> between all of the developers a year or more ago. I'm not willing to revisit

Is there a copy of this discussion archived anywhere?  The debian-devel
archives I found on www.debian.org start from July 1995 (November 1900
was a mistake, I guess, especially since the only message there refers
to sendmail-8.6.12-8 which almost certainly didn't exist in 1900 :-).

One new problem with USERGROUPS is that it is incompatible with group
quotas (which were not supported by the standard kernel a year ago).
Maybe it would be good to discuss this again now?

At the very least, let's not enforce creating a new user account before
dselect is run.  This would at least make it possible for the user to
edit /etc/adduser.conf first and turn off USERGROUPS if they wish so.

Marek