Cleaning up the users and locking down the shells in /etc/passwd

[Colin Watson]

On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 11:03:55AM -0700, Matt Alexander wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 8:06 AM, Colin Watson <cjwatson at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> > On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 06:12:24AM -0700, Matt Alexander wrote:
> > > On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 1:28 AM, Colin Watson <cjwatson at ubuntu.com>
> > wrote:
> > > > I'm afraid this is backwards.  If you want to go and hunt down packages
> > > > that rely on those global static users and get their maintainers
> > > > (preferably in Debian) to work on a migration to dynamically-allocated
> > > > system users, perhaps after that it would be worth removing the global
> > > > static users.  Until then, they need to stay where they are.
> > >
> > > Seems like detecting broken packages from system changes would already be
> > > part of the Ubuntu qual. process.
> >
> > It's always better to not break things in the first place.
> 
> Sometimes breaking things is necessary for forward progress.

Certainly, in general.  This isn't one of those times.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]