Package: adduser Version: 3.118 Severity: minor File: /usr/sbin/deluser Hi,
to my surprise, I found out that deluser --force does not what I think¹ but it allows to delete the root user. It's documented that way, but it's misnamed in my opinion. In fact, https://codesearch.debian.net/search?q=deluser.*force&literal=0 clearly shows that all pacakge maintainers who use deluser --force are using it wrong. The safeguard against removing root should be relaxed with an option like --no-preserve-root (see, man 1 rm), so that --force can be used for the analogon to rm --force as to not returning an error when a user to be deleted didnt expect in the first place. This can then be used if the author of a script just cares about the result (e.g. user gone) after the deluser call without caring for whether the user existed before the call or not. Greetings Marc ¹ I expected it to make deleting a user that does not exist not an error
