Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT] TEST RELEASE: Cygwin 1.7.33-0.6

[Christian Franke <Christian dot Franke at t-online dot de>]

Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> On Nov  7 21:51, Christian Franke wrote:
> > Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> > > > > In theory there should be only one option -l [machine], which prints the
> > > > > local accounts of the current machine unprefixed (standalone machine) or
> > > > > prefixed (domain machine), and always prefixed for a foreign machine.
> > > > > The -L option can just go away.
> > > > I disgree.
> > > >
> > > > Why not keep the old behavior of -l/-L for user names of current machine for
> > > > those uses cases which rely on it?
> > > You are always free to change the passwd/group files manually:
> > >
> > >    $ mkpasswd -l | sed -e 's/^[^:]*+//' > /etc/passwd
> > Of course, and it is good that this is still possible. But this would
> > require that all existing scripts relying on old behavior need to be
> > changed.
> >
> > I still don't understand why this backward compatibility break of "mkpasswd
> > -l" was mandatory.
> >
> > Most *-config scripts using "mkpasswd -l -u USER" may need to be changed.
> Definitely.  The change is inevitable since most scripts using mkpasswd
> or mkgroup do so to create entries in /etc/passwd and /etc/group.  But
> this doesn't make sense anymore, or if so, only marginally so.

OK.

What will be the behavior of the predecessor of e.g. the csih function 
csih_create_unprivileged_user if called with USER without HOST prefix, 
machine is inside of domain and the user does not exist:
- create local windows USER and require the config script to retrieve 
the actual Cygwin HOST+USER name,
- fail and tell the calling config script to retry with HOST+USER 
instead (if possible),
- create local windows USER and create a /etc/passwd entry to support a 
non-prefixed Cygwin USER in this case,
- one of the above, selected by a new option.
- ...
?


> > Local scripts from Cygwin users which use "mkpasswd -l" may need to be
> > changed.
> They are not supposed to use mkpasswd anymore since they don't need it,
> only in very special circumstances.

Wouldn't it be better to let mkpasswd -l simply fail with an explanatory 
error message instead of producing non-backward compatible results? Or 
at least print a warning to stderr?


>    And then I expect that they will
> have to change the created files manually anyway.

It depends. One of my use cases relies on non-prefixed local user names 
which match the (also non-prefixed :-) windows local user names. The 
usual duplicates with domain users (Administrator, Guest) never resulted 
in any problems.

Christian


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