Luke/others,
Do you think it's safe to parse the /etc/password and /etc/groups file
in the case of the self.instances call?
Which is to say, are there any platforms that don't at least follow
the convention of "username:password:UID:" ?
That would go a long way towards solving the bug, and we wouldn't have
to deal the problem of correctly reading and writing all fields.

On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 2:00 PM, Luke Kanies <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Feb 25, 2011, at 1:55 PM, Sean Millichamp wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 2011-02-25 at 13:32 -0800, Jesse Wolfe wrote:
>>> Sorry that I'm late to the party one this one, but I have some questions.
>>> groupadd must also have the problem, is that correct?
>>> And it probably also affects the "pw" provider for BSD?
>>>
>>> If so, I think we should remove the getent code entirely and replace
>>> it with passwd and group file parsing at the share ancestor.
>>
>> Jesse,
>>
>> That is likely true.  However, my initial question on that approach is
>> are there other instances in Puppet where user lookups occur for some
>> reason that require results from LDAP or other nsswitch/pw providers
>> (I'm thinking file ownership and maybe ssh_authorized_key users).  I
>> don't have any idea how Puppet handles those types of things internally.
>
> We just use the system POSIX APIs for data reading, so it always goes through 
> whatever the system is configured to use.
>
> There's been a ticket open for ages to switch from the APIs to 
> reading/writing the files.  The downside of doing so is that compatibility 
> becomes a bit harder - we're currently relying entirely on APIs and commands, 
> which means the system has to handle compatibility, but once you start 
> reading and writing the files it can suck.  E.g., HP-UX has a line-length 
> limit in the groups file (I think it's 1024 chars, which many groups exceed), 
> and it silently ignores anything past that limit, so you have to split all 
> groups based on that length into multiple lines.  That's just one I know 
> about, but I expect that every platform has something equally stupid.
>
> --
> I take my children everywhere, but they always find their way
> back home.       --Robert Orben
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> Luke Kanies  -|-   http://puppetlabs.com   -|-   +1(615)594-8199
>
>
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