(enlarging the discussion again..:-)). See http://bugs.debian.org/134473
> > I'm CCing debian NIS packager (hello Miquel) to see what he think about it. > > [For the context, shadow packaging just changed into a team effort, and > > we're doing massive bug triage] > > Well actually nowadays Mark Brown does most (the last few releases, > all) of the work on NIS. > > But it's probably not a bad idea to make the tools more flexible. > It sure beats vi :) Well, I will need to be convinced..:-) Up to now, we are still looking at useradd/userdel as "low-level" tools and thus the "high-level" functionality is better be integrated into adduser/deluser. We also have, for instance, a request to make useradd add users in LDAP backends and we could even end up in requests to be able to add users in "winbind" backends one can have with the samba package (users authenticated against a NT domain). I'm very reluctant to push such feature requests to upstream shadow and ask it with all possible name services systems. I think that adding a kind of plugin mechanism to Debian specific adduser utilities would be more logical, if that's feasible. Marc and adduser maintainers, opinions, thoughts ?