non fedora-usermgmt user creation

[Michael Schwendt]

On Wed, 22 Mar 2006 16:01:07 +0100, Christian.Iseli at licr.org wrote:

> What I proposed is to come up with a scheme that actually let the admin 
> choose, and not require to convince all FE packagers they should change their 
> packages.  I thought that a fedora-usermgmt package that fully replaces 
> shadow-utils would work.  You seem to think it can't work...

Without overriding shadow-utils from the outside, you cannot replace it or
change its behaviour. Without modifying the dependency chain, you cannot
influence installation-order either. Hence there's no way to insert a
configuration package into the depchain.

Technically, packages which run "useradd" require /usr/sbin/useradd in
Fedora space. They don't require an arbitrary "useradd" in $PATH.
They don't require a package with the name "shadow-utils". And no other
package (not in Core and not in Extras either) must replace or otherwise
conflict with /usr/sbin/useradd unless it is given a different file
name. Moving the system utility in order to replace it with a modified
utility (with different behaviour) opens a can of worms.