[Nix-dev] Declarative user management merged to master

[James Cook]

On 5 February 2014 07:07, Rickard Nilsson <rickard.nilsson at telia.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have pushed https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/1076 to
> nixpkgs/master now. If you don't set users.mutableUsers to false,
> everything _should_ work as before, but watch out just in case.
>
> See the PR discussion and
> https://github.com/rickynils/nixpkgs/commit/e3de5140ef259d718e0ec9e6c6e1418464589e2a
> for more info.

I just experienced a strange problem which might be related: after a
nixos-rebuild, lightdm didn't start, even after I rolled back to a
previous configuration.

The reason was that the owner of /var/lib/lightdm got changed to 78,
which doesn't correspond to any user in my passwd file*.  I haven't
fiddled with mutableUsers, so I guess it is set to true.

If I run the following two commands after restarting, lightdm starts.
# chown lightdm /var/lib/lightdm
# systemctl restart display-manager.service

I'm not sure I understand the whole story here, but maybe there is a
chown somewhere which shouldn't get executed when users.mutableUsers
is set to true?

James

* nixos/modules/misc/ids.nix says lightdm's uid should be 78, but my
passwd file says it is 499.