bug#23971: Nobody has a shell

[Vincent Legoll]

On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 3:03 PM, Ludovic Courtès <address@hidden> wrote:
> Vincent Legoll <address@hidden> skribis:
>
>>> Indeed, fixed in 2d94702ff4133606cda1e51a2c8378a8e79afb9d.
>>>
>>> The ‘shell’ field was omitted from the definition of “nobody”, which is
>>> why it ended up using Bash, which is the default shell.
>>
>> Thanks the fix looks good, but I tried with guix system reconfigure
>> after guix pull
>> That does not change /etc/passwd
>
> It does change /etc/passwd (specifically, this is done in ‘modify-user’
> in activation.scm, which is itself run from the activation script of the
> new system that ‘guix system reconfigure’ runs; note that this changes
> the shell but leaves the home directory unchanged, see the comment in
> there.)
>
> Could it be that you did not run ‘guix pull’ as root?  Remember that
> ‘guix pull’ is per-user:

Yep, that was probably the case.

I tested in a new VM (from scratch) 0.10.0 usb install
- initially: /var/empy + bash
- guix pull + reconfigure : usermod: change shell to nologin, but home
dir stayed the same
- delete user nobody + guix system reconfigure: user nobody is back,
with /nonexistent home dir

So this looks like it is fixed, and next usb install should be good
from 1st day...

-- 
Vincent Legoll