New Fedora 22 Change proposal: systemd-sysusers

[Colin Walters]

On Thu, Jul 10, 2014, at 12:46 AM, William wrote:

> Under what conditions are these two files created / touched? 

When systemd-sysusers is run.

> When I install a package and add a file to this sysuser directory, is
> only that user added to passwd and shadow? 

The answer to this is pretty simple; systemd-sysusers does nothing if
the user already exists.  It has built-in idempotency.  Contrast with
the fact that shadow-utils doesn't, so all of the RPM %pre scripts
duplicate it in shell.

> Is there a way to disable or remove a system user from being added
> to /etc/shadow? 

Why?

> Are changes to shadow/passwd made by a user respected / preserved (IE to
> a user account)? 

Yes.

> What happens if a human edits the system account generated by systemd,
> do the changes get lost?

See above; if you edit the passwd entry post-creation, systemd won't
change it.