GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 698449
Handle creating a new user with an identical name to an old one
Last modified: 2021-06-09 16:14:12 UTC
From bug 681773: "currently when you delete an account without deleting the files, and then create another user account with the same user name, that new user gets all the user's files. This works as expected if you understand how unix users work, but not necessarily expected otherwise. In addition it may cause problems if the new user has a different uid." There are a number of options here: * Always delete a user's files when their account is removed * When the new user account is created, ask whether the old account's files are to be used, and do the necessary chown foo I think that the main question here is - why would you want to keep the old files, and why would you like to create a new user account with the files from an old one?
Created attachment 286511 [details] [review] always delete user's files when account is removed Do not make sense to me to not delete the files together with account...
Review of attachment 286511 [details] [review]: That's not really how we should do it. Instead, we shouldn't allow creating the new user, I would think. Or mention that the user's files are in the way.
> I think that the main question here is - why would you want to keep the old > files, and why would you like to create a new user account with the files from > an old one? You want to keep the old files because they might contain valuable content that needs to be preserved, even if the user is no longer on the system. Think ex-employee. We could probably avoid the problem with user-recreation by tarring up the home directory and archiving it somewhere. But the tools we are currently using (userdel indirectly via accountsservice) do not offer this functionality.
Review of attachment 286511 [details] [review]: Marking as needs-work as per comments
GNOME is going to shut down bugzilla.gnome.org in favor of gitlab.gnome.org. As part of that, we are mass-closing older open tickets in bugzilla.gnome.org which have not seen updates for a longer time (resources are unfortunately quite limited so not every ticket can get handled). If you can still reproduce the situation described in this ticket in a recent and supported software version, then please follow https://wiki.gnome.org/GettingInTouch/BugReportingGuidelines and create a new bug report at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-control-center/-/issues/ Thank you for your understanding and your help.