Check for tools to manage users/groups not useful on all GNU/Linux distributions

[paulmenzel]

#2019 adds a check for all tools used by make install to the configure script.

There are distribution not using these tools to manage users and groups, or build hosts that do not want the user/group configuration be changed. Therefore, this check prevents building on these systems. It’d be great if these tools could be made optional.

After removing these checks, ./configure succeeds here, and make install just throws warnings, if these utilities are not there, so works.

[AndreasFuchsTPM]

Which one of the tools groupadd, useradd, id, chown, chmod, mkdir, setfacl ist not available on your platform ?

[paulmenzel]

Which one of the tools groupadd, useradd, id, chown, chmod, mkdir, setfacl ist not available on your platform ?

groupadd and useradd

[AndreasFuchsTPM]

What are the alternatives that you use ?

[paulmenzel]

We have our own scripts to edit /etc/{passwd,shadow}.

[AndreasFuchsTPM]

How do other software projects handle this ?
... or do you usually just alias passwd=true ?
Because I don't know if we really want to just add a configure switch for disabling this.
On typical platforms, I'd expect coreutils to be installed.

[paulmenzel]

How do other software projects handle this ? ... or do you usually just alias passwd=true ? Because I don't know if we really want to just add a configure switch for disabling this. On typical platforms, I'd expect coreutils to be installed.

Well, actually it’s quite common to not create users and edit system files by default, as often there are dedicated build hosts building the package to be installed. And then only during package installation some scripts take care of creating users and groups and so on.