useradd -m doesn't copy skel dotfiles on reiserfs

[roarde]

Light A0.2.5 Advanced install both with and without IceWM. No bootloader, home is on the newly formatted reiserfs / partition; not a separate partition.

Both times reiserfs was used, installation did not create dotfiles in the regular user's home directory. Root did get dotfiles. Creating a new user with "useradd -m user" would apparently succeed, but it posted the message:
/usr/sbin/useradd: /etc/skel/.<first-dotfile> Invalid parameter.
and no dotfiles were copied. Renaming ".dmrc" to "dmrc" (no dot) allowed that file to be copied during home directory creation, but no others.

Copying the useradd binary from a 7.1 installation seemed to solve the problem. Reinstalling shadow from the 7.2 repo brought the problem back.

The problem did not occur on the next installation, with ext4 used for / instead of reiserfs.

[roarde]

For both reiserfs and ext4 installs, "Use existing partitions" was chosen, with the fstype selected when choosing target partitions.

Partition table is MBR, with swap and / in linux extended partitions.

[Moises Henriquez]

I updated shadow to 4.2.1 on commit ee422e7

Try updating it via slapt-get and then try to reproduce this bug.

[roarde]

Duplicated problem with a fresh reiserfs install of A1. Added user with 7.1's useradd, then saw above request. Installing shadow 4.2.1 caused the problem to return.

We certainly do want to have reiserfs support for our users' existing reiser partitions. But given the history of slow updates and problems with reiserfs, might it be time to remove it from the list of filesystems that the installer will create?

Has anyone tried this with XFS or JFS?

[Moises Henriquez]

Based on personal experience, I will never again try anything other than ext[234], but I agree, we should try to nail this down and see that is going on.

Can you provide the specific setup where the problems occurs?

• Partition format used for /
• Separate /home? if so, what fs (format) was selected and did you select 'format' or 'DO NOT FORMAT' at install time?
• Is the problem on the account created by the installer or fresh account after the system is installed?
• Does creating a new account on the system after the initial boot result in the same problem?

[roarde]

/ is reiserfs, home is on that partition, not separate. The problem occurs on the account created by the installer and any accounts created after installation.

Problem is not fixed by removing ConsoleKit2, installing ConsoleKit, doing --upgrade, then rebooting.

Problem does not occur when combined / and home are xfs or ext4; I've only tested these three.

[Moises Henriquez]

Verified

[nightflier]

reiserfs is no longer an option in installer, this should be resolved as "invalid" or similar.

[Moises Henriquez]

Reiserfs has not been maintained in years, this led to us removing this choice from the installer FS options. This issue should no longer affect anyone doing a VL installation from scratch.

Caveat: If users format their partitions to reiser outside of our installer and choose "DO NOT FORMAT", they will still run into this problem. This however we cannot prevent or support.