[chef] Re: Re: Re: CHEF-2205: manage_home on Redhat

[John Alberts < >]

I think having manage_home behave differently per platform would be confusing and lead to more code changes on the user side in order to account for different platforms.  While I sort of understand Mike's point, I don't necessarily agree.  Since I use data bags for users and loop through to create the users I have one line to change to accommodate this behavior change in Chef.  Definitely not a big deal.

John

On Wed, Jan 30, 2013 at 9:31 AM, Bryan McLellan < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 3:47 PM, Mike < "> > wrote:
> I, for one using RedHat/CentOS/Amazon Linux, expect a user's account
> creation to always have a home directory created, unless the following
> is true:
> - A 'system' user account is created (useradd -r)
> - Explicitly override with 'manage_home false' (effectively 'useradd -M')

That's exactly what I was asking. The problem is, there's currently no
way to use the user resource on these system and have it not create a
home directory, even explicitly. This is because manage_home defaults
to false already. Thus it is broken in two ways,

1) The user resource is different by default on redhat than other platforms

2) You can't use it to create user without two home directories

The goal of the ticket was to fixed #2, but it does change #1 too. If
the expectation of Redhat users, particularly ones who are new to how
Chef works now, expect home directories to always be created, then an
alternative would be to apply this fix, but also set manage_home to
default to true on those platforms. We could do this by platform,
platform_family, or be more hack-ish and look for a /etc/login.defs
with this value set.

> Don't break my Chef.
>
> If this is included in Chef 11 - as it probably should be, as it's a
> logical bug, considering the default value of :manage_home is false,
> then this should be lit up in lights, painted across the sky, shouted
> across the rooftops.

Please understand we're not trying to break you, but find the best
possible outcome to fix this bug and provide a Chef that produces the
least surprises to new users.

Bryan

--
John Alberts