On Thu, Jun 22, 2023 at 12:33 PM Aoife Moloney <amoloney@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> The main benefit is to decrease the maintenance and packaging work
> on library that does not bring much value while the functionality is
> provided by another components.
On most (all?) Linux distributions, Puppet relies on libuser in order
to manage group membership as an attribute of a group (1), because
historically the shadow-utils package could not. There are folks who
use Puppet to manage Fedora systems, and pulling the libuser package
will break the ability of Puppet to manage group membership on Fedora.
Background:
libuser provides the ability to intuitively manage local group
membership as an attribute of the group, instead of attributes of
users.
To add a user to a group:
lgroupmod -M someuser somegroup
To remove a user from a group:
lgroupmod -m someuser somegroup
For shadow-utils, adding can be achieved with:
groupmod -a -U someuser somegroup
But groupmod has no ability to remove a user from a group.
Historically, before shadow-utils 4.10, the only way to remove a user
from a group was to use:
usermod -G groupset someuser
…where groupset was the set of all supplementary groups for the user
but with somegroup removed. This was racy and error-prone.
For shadow-utils 4.10 or later, usermod has a new -r option, so it is
possible to construct an equivalent:
usermod -r -G somegroup someuser
While this is a vast improvement, I would argue this option was added
to the wrong utility: groupmod should have the ability to remove a
user from a group, the same as lgroupmod. It’s also fairly new (RHEL9
still has shadow-utils 4.9, for example).
I don’t disagree with the reasons for wanting to drop libuser; I just
wish that…
* the shadow-utils package could provide the equivalent
functionality in a more intuitive way, and…
* this change could be pushed to at least Fedora 40, to provide more
time for downstream consumers of libuser to move away from it.
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