POSTUN scriptlet failure in rpm package cyrus-sasl

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 02:31:43PM -0000, Quentin Armitage wrote:
> See https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=572399
> 
> 
>> groupdel: group 'saslauth' does not exist Non-fatal POSTUN scriptlet failure
>> in rpm package cyrus-sasl
>> warning: %postun(cyrus-sasl-2.1.23-4.fc12.i686) scriptlet failed, exit
>> status 6
>> 
>> 
>> This looks benign, but I suppose it could check if the group exists before
>> attempting to delete it.
>> 

There's actually a not so benign side of this.  Here's what the Guidelines
say about removing groups:

"""
We never remove users or groups created by packages. There's no sane way to
check if files owned by those users/groups are left behind (and even if
there would, what would we do to them?), and leaving those behind with
ownerships pointing to now nonexistent users/groups may result in security
issues when a semantically unrelated user/group is created later and reuses
the UID/GID. Also, in some setups deleting the user/group might not be
possible or/nor desirable (eg. when using a shared remote user/group
database). Cleanup of unused users/groups is left to the system
administrators to take care of if they so desire. 
"""

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:UsersAndGroups

I've updated bugzilla with this information as well.

-Toshoi
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