On Fri, 8 Oct 2004, Jonathan Perkin wrote:

> * On 2004-10-08 at 13:08 BST, Gavan Fantom wrote:
>
>> * Not update /etc/shells if it's not present. This is easy to do,
>>   but leaves users of the shells installed from pkgsrc unable to log
>>   in without intervention from the administrator.
>
> This would be my preferred option; intervention from the administrator
> is needed anyway to install the shell, and getusershell(3) doesn't
> seem to be too clever - it adds all the shells listed in the manpage
> whether they are installed or not, and thereby create an /etc/shells
> which does not agree with shells(4):
>
>  DESCRIPTION
>       The shells file contains a list of the shells on the system.
>       Applications  use  this file to determine whether a shell is
>       valid.
>  [...]

If /etc/shells isn't present, it's equivalent to containing all of the 
shells returned by getusershell(3). Even if that doesn't seem to be too 
clever, listing those shells in /etc/shells is no more wrong than the 
default in getusershell(3).

> A well-worded MESSAGE should suffice, in my opinion (and would be my
> preferred way of dealing this with my sysadmin hat on).

Do we have support for printing a MESSAGE at view-install time based on 
whether /etc/shells is present or not? On systems where /etc/shells 
does exist, we already just add the shell to it.

I would have thought that for consistency we oughtn't to require extra 
administrator intervention on one platform where we don't on others.

-- 
Gillette - the best a man can forget