Date: Fri, 25 Jun 1999 17:51:21 -0700
Message-Id: <199906260051.RAA05843@bittersweet.sysc.pdx.edu>
From: "Karl M. Hegbloom" <karlheg@cathcart.sysc.pdx.edu>
Subject: xemacs21: There ought to be an `adduser' program for Debian's XEmacs
To: submit@bugs.debian.org

Package: xemacs21
Version: N/A
Severity: wishlist

 There ought to be an `adduser' type program written for XEmacs.  It can
utilize the new widgets toolkit for an interface.

It should be able to deal with NIS, and able to run on a workstation
that is NOT the NIS master, in an environment where the NIS master
ought not be loaded by an XEmacs editor.  So the edits of the NIS
master passwd and group databases should be done remotely, via rsh or
ssh interchangeably.

 In some environments, there are many many users all in one group, and
they all share a home directory.  The solaris shadow utils (of around
1997-1998) are known to have a problem with that where when you add a new user,
parts of the group get lost.  We had to edit the groups file by hand because
there are too many users in a group:

groupname:x:42:user1,user2,...
groupname1:x:42:userN,...

 Because `login' and such cannot handle a huge group line; it must be split
to fit in whatever buffer size it had allocated.

 There are likely other issues that will need to be considered by the
coders who write the adduser interface for XEmacs.

-- System Information
Debian Release: potato
Kernel Version: Linux bittersweet 2.2.9 #3 Tue Jun 1 04:56:01 /etc/localtime 1999 i586 unknown