Hi.

Currently the maintainer scripts set the homedir for this package to be
in /home/<username>.
As this is system user, I'd say this is rather bad style.

Could you please move this to something more reasonable and also change
it for upgraded systems?


Cheers,
Chris.

Which script are you talking about?  I do not see the path
mentioned in any of them.

I don't see how maintair scripts need to change anything for the
upgrade in that case, either they do the right thing or don't.


Kurt

Am 27.03.2012 09:04, schrieb Kurt Roeckx:
/var/lib/dpkg/info$ grep adduser ntp*
ntp.postinst:	adduser --system --quiet --ingroup ntp --no-create-home
ntp

While this doesn't create a directory, it sets the home dir to the
default /home/<user> in /etc/passwd:
$ grep ntp /etc/passwd
ntp:x:102:104::/home/ntp:/bin/false
Well,.. obviously they did it not "cleanly",.. to the usual way is to
clean up on upgrades, otherwise
users will stay with the old settings forever.


Cheers,
Chris.

We could set it to /var/lib/ntp instead, but changing it on upgrade
sounds a bit hairy.

I think it's also kind of a bug in adduser that it creates system users
with a home directory under /home.

Sounds good to me.
Well if it's really a hassle,.. let it be,...
But IMHO it shouldn't be too much of a problem:

usermod -d /var/lib/ntp

in the configure step.


The code can be dropped in wheezy+1 one,... cause only direct upgrades
are officially supported.


Not to costly, and every user get's the "current" state :)
Guess you're right,... the question is what other safe value could it
use?
Then only reasonable I can think of is something like /nonexistent/ as a
fallback when nothing is provided.
Falling back to the current /home/<system-user> is ugly, but at least it
should be "safe".


Cheers,
Chris.

Anything new on that?

It seems fresh installations nowadays get a proper homedir, however all
legacy installations are still left out.

e.g. nfs-common.postinst shows how old installations can be easily
updated.


Cheers,
Chris