Re: /etc/shells (was Re: procmail)

[poodge () econ Berkeley EDU (Sam Quigley)]

On Thu, 8 Aug 1996, Eugene Bradley wrote:

[...]
> I kinda like der Mouse's latter idea.  In fact, here are some ideas
> for the flags that can be used in a passwd database that root can
> edit in as necessary.  I don't know if some UNIX OSes support this
> feature currently in the form of kernel flags; this is an idea I have
> off the top of my head.
>
> Flag                    Attribute
> - ----                  ---------
[...]

As far as I know, this has not been implemented -- but I think it would
be useful.  The key to implementing a system like this is the system's
extensibility -- the system needs to be easily extended to fill unseen
future needs, etc.

Clearly, these data can't be held in /etc/passwd -- the format of passwd
is set, and can't really be changed at this point.  The shadow password
system already has a bunch of extra fields in /etc/shadow that set things
like password aging, but we can't really muck around with shadow for the
same reasons we can't muck around with passwd.  But shadow proves that a
parallel dbase can work.

As I see it, to create a system like this, we need a new adduser script;
other than this, each program that is to be enabled or disabled (chsh,
procmail, etc.) needs modification.

Anyway.  Assuming that there is not already a system like this in place,
I'd like to volunteer to draft a standard and proof-of-concept set of
tools.  But I'd like to make sure this would actually be useful to people
other than me: would it?

(other volunteers would be good too...)
-sq