Re: [gentoo-user] Re: pambase/shadow warning

[Allan Gottlieb]

On Fri, Apr 20 2012, Neil Bothwick wrote:

> On Fri, 20 Apr 2012 13:22:20 +0100, Neil Bothwick wrote:
>
>> > I'll run the update again today, paying more attention, and see what
>> > happens.
>>
>> What happened is it broke again, with no obvious signs of the cause.
>> conf-update reported only trivial changes to three files.
>
> I've just tried it on my netbook and the same happened, but I think I'm
> closer to the cause. The three files in /etc/pam.d are login, passwd and
> su. After updating, there were ._cfg* versions of these files, but no
> originals, so conf-update just deleted them. It turns out these were
> owned by shadow but now belong to pambase. I suspect that pambase
> installed them as ._cfg versions, because the others already existed,
> then shadow removed the originals as they were no longer part of the
> package.
>
> Whether this is a bug in portage, the ebuilds or conf-update is open to
> debate, but conf-update ought to handle the situation better. I'll file a
> bug later if no one beats me to it.

First, thanks for the warning.

There is a bug filed https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=412721

The comments there say that if you run etc-update right after the
emerge all is well (but this isn't sufficient for people who use
screen, detatch, and log out).  Someone also mentioned dispatch-conf
working.  No one mentioned cfg-update, which I use (and I believe
neil does as well).  Could the problem be dependent on which
configuration file updater one uses?

I have not updated my primary machine.  I did update another one (both
machines are ~amd64) including a cfg-update -q, but have not rebooted
it.  The secondary can su.  This seems to suggest that cfg-update is
sufficient in some cases.

Am I correct in believing the safe procedure is to add

>=sys-auth/pambase-20101024-r2
>=sys-apps/shadow-4.1.5.

to /etc/portage/package.mask (or a file in that directory)?

thanks,
allan