[Bug 1323732] Re: adduser should support managing additional password/shadow/group files from libnss-extrausers

[Dimitri John Ledkov]

Hm. I don't think I like this patch =)

In Clearlinux.org we use nss-altfiles, not extrausers project. And I
have extensively patched shadow to support altfiles. Ideally I would
like that support to be reviewed and landed upstream. Specifically all
system accounts & groups are defined in altfiles, yet one can do things
like "add this system account to this system group" in which case
relevant stanzas from system data files is copied and stored in files
under /etc/.

Can we merge this support in shadow? At the moment it seems like
clearlinux.org, ubuntu (snappy), fedora (atomic) are using
altfiles/extrausers and all would want proper support in shadow of
setups with split system-provided accounts & user/admin modified
accounts.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1323732

Title:
  adduser should support managing additional password/shadow/group files
  from libnss-extrausers

Status in adduser package in Ubuntu:
  In Progress

Bug description:
  with our readonly system-image setup when adding a user or changing a password using the /etc/{passwd,shadow,group} is not actually possible. 
  we plan to solve this via using libnss-extrausers and patching the config in /etc/nsswitch.conf at image build-time. this way we can make /var/lib/extrausers writable and use passwd,shadow and group from there.

  unfortunately adduser is not able to operate on these files in the
  non-standard location. to set a user password (for having a properly
  working lock screen), add new users or drop the "nopasswordlogin"
  group from the phablet user it needs to learn handling these files so
  that we do not need to use weird hacks to manage users on system-image
  installs.

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