Re: bin/59990: /etc/security: first run mails megabytes of output

["Taylor R Campbell via gnats" <gnats-admin%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

The following reply was made to PR bin/59990; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Taylor R Campbell <riastradh%NetBSD.org@localhost>
To: Valery Ushakov <uwe%stderr.spb.ru@localhost>
Cc: gnats-bugs%netbsd.org@localhost, netbsd-bugs%netbsd.org@localhost
Subject: Re: bin/59990: /etc/security: first run mails megabytes of output
Date: Sun, 15 Feb 2026 14:34:21 +0000

 > Date: Sun, 15 Feb 2026 14:55:28 +0300
 > From: Valery Ushakov <uwe%stderr.spb.ru@localhost>
 > 
 > On Sat, Feb 14, 2026 at 08:25:02 +0000, Martin Husemann via gnats wrote:
 > 
 > >  This doesn't help typical image installs (often used for virtual
 > >  machines), where we just resize the filesystem and continue running
 > >  the install medium.
 > 
 > But we can just prepopulate /var/backups on such images when creating
 > them.
 
 We could try that, but it's not easy.
 
 We'd have to either duplicate all the logic in /etc/security or factor
 it out into a common place, and make it operate relative to a destdir.
 And we'd have to model the listing of devices and suid/sgid files via
 mtree(8) -- and find some way to model the disklabels and MBRs too
 (and GPTs if we did that).
 
 So perhaps a simpler approach -- and what I'm trying right now for the
 present purpose -- is an rc script that just does:
 
 	# Make sure /etc/security has saved a backup of everything.
 	if ! [ -s /var/backups/etc/master.passwd.current ]; then
 		/etc/security >/dev/null
 	fi
 
 (master.passwd is the one file that is unconditionally always backed
 up, hard-coded in /etc/security.)