adduser (3.135) experimental; urgency=medium adduser's logging code has been completely replaced. In the new code, every message has a message level, and adduser can be configured which messages get written to standard output, standard error and syslog. Both configuration file and command line options exist to influence adduser's verbosity. For the time being, the message level of existing messages has not been changed, and the default configuration resembles what we had in the past. In the next few months, we will be tweaking message levels and default configuration so that normal account generation in maintainer scripts will be mainly silent, and especially silent if adduser is a no-op because everything is already the way it should be. In addition to writing messages to the console, the new logging code will also write to syslog, hopefully making it easier to debug other packages. The message level of messages written to syslog can also be configured in the configuration file and overridden via command line. Messages written to syslog are always in English while console output uses translations. The adduser/deluser binaries now return well-define exit codes that allows the caller to find out more easily what has been going wrong through the exit code. If you have code that evaluates adduser/deluser's exit codes, please review the docs. -- Marc Haber Fri, 09 Jun 2023 18:04:39 +0200 adduser (3.130) unstable; urgency=low deluser's --no-preserve-root option is deprecated, and it will be removed after Debian bookworm. deluser will in the future completely refuse to delete the root user. If you want to delete root, you need to use other tools. We are planning to deprecate and remove the GROUPHOMES and LETTERHOMES configuration options. They help big installations, but nowadays those installations are probably using a directory service like LDAP and Active Directory to manage their users and do not use adduser anyway. If you're using one of these options and want them to stay, please write that to #1025623 and let us know. Some kind of help and committment, for example verified autopkgtest scripts, would be appreciated and make it easier for us to keep the feature around. We are planning to deprecate and remove the QUOTAUSER configuration option. If you're using this, please write that to #1026898 and let us know. Some kind of help and committment, for example verified autopkg testscripts, would be appreciated and make it easier for us to keep the feature around. There have been some changes to --disabled-password and --disabled-login, documented in adduser(8). Maintainers using these options with adduser --system in their maintainer scripts should review their scripts and check whether the default is enough and the options can be removed. The --gecos option is being renamed to --comment to get aligned with passwd's terminology. --gecos will continue to work throughout the bookworm cycle. The NEWS entry for 3.124, shown below, was added to give more explanation about the addition of the users group as a supplementary group to a newly created user. This change was inconsistently documented in adduser(8), this inconsistency was fixed in adduser 3.130. -- Marc Haber Sun, 25 Dec 2022 17:11:31 +0100 adduser (3.124) unstable; urgency=medium As pointed out in #678615, adduser has behaved somewhat inconsistently in the past, using the users group (GID 100) only if USERGROUPS was set to the non-default 'no'. This has been changed as documented in adduser.conf(5): If USERGROUPS is yes, the newly created user will now be added as a supplementary group; if USERGROUPS is no, users will be the primary group. If you want to restore the old behavior, set USERGROUPS=yes, leave USERS_GROUP empty and set USERS_GID to "-1". (this NEWS entry has been added retroactively with adduser 3.130) -- Marc Haber Thu, 01 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0100 adduser (3.123) unstable; urgency=medium The default for DIR_MODE has been set to 0700 for this release, again, after adduser 3.122 had DIR_MODE set to 2700. Previous versions of adduser defaulted to 0700 for the majority of this century. The default for SYS_DIR_MODE is still 0755. Note that the default for DIR_MODE is a change from historical defaults, which were more permissive for normal user home directories. Adjustments may need to be made for setups like public_html web content, or in-homedir mail configurations. System Administrators wanting a different default can set DIR_MODE in /etc/adduser.conf to their desired value after installation. The one user created during system installation needs to have the home directory mode bits adjusted to the preferred value after installation of the system since there is no possibility to have this directly set in the Installer. See /usr/share/doc/adduser/README.Debian for detailed reasoning. -- Marc Haber Wed, 20 Jul 2022 10:51:21 +0200 adduser (3.122) unstable; urgency=low This version implements SYS_DIR_MODE for home directories belonging to system users. Before that, the home directory of a system user was also influenced by the setting of DIR_MODE. This is no longer the case. --add_extra_groups is now --add-extra-groups. The old spelling is still possible and will remain supported during Debian bookworm, allowing package maintainers and local users to slowly migrate during the bookworm cycle. --force-badname is now --allow-badname. The old spelling is still possible and will remain supported during Debian bookworm, allowing package maintainers and local users to slowly migrate during the bookworm cycle. System user home defaults to /nonexistent if --home is not specified. Packages that call adduser to create system accounts should explicitly specify a location for /home (see Lintian check maintainer-script-lacks-home-in-adduser). -- Marc Haber Wed, 13 Jul 2022 20:30:00 +0200