Subject: bug#40652: #36924 way solves the problem for me

From: Guillaume Le Vaillant <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 17 Apr 2020 11:06:48 +0200

Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]> skribis:

> ‘%gdm-activation’ would throw an exception if the “gdm” user didn’t
> exist, so apparently it’s run before the activation snippet of
> ‘account-service-type’ (the ordering guarantee is not explicit.)
>
> Hmm I wonder what I’m missing then.  Would you like to try again?

I tried again and I wasn't able to reproduce the problem.
Maybe I did something weird with my config last time, but I can't
remember what it could have been...

> Now, I think we should generalize this chown thing and apply it to all
> the user accounts.  ‘user-homes’ would chown recursively if needed or
> use the newfangled shiftfs, like systemd-homed does¹.
>
> Thoughts?
> Ludo’.
>
> ¹ https://systemd.io/HOME_DIRECTORY/

A recursive chown for system accounts (with their home directory
somewhere in '/var') sounds like a good idea.

For user accounts (in '/home'), I guess it could be slightly annoying if
a user wants to set a specific group id to some of their files and if it
gets set back to the 'users' group at each system reconfiguration.
However it's probably not a very common use case, and if we only change
the files' uid, they could end up with an invalid gid anyway.