Package: dwww
Version: 1.9.21
Severity: minor

A user I just helped on #debian met the alarming message

| Setting up dwww (1.9.21) ...
| User root does not exist
| dpkg: error processing dwww (--configure):
|  subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 255

which suggested that some critical infrastructure on his system was
really fscked up. It turned out that he had set the 'cgiuser' debconf
setting to "root", and then the following line in the postinst

     my $uid = (getpwnam("$dwwwcfg{'cgiuser'}"))[2]
       or die "User $dwwwcfg{'cgiuser'} does not exist\n";

cannot distinguish between a non-existing user and an existing one with
uid 0 (because perl treats all of 0, "", and undef as false).

It is, of course, badly wrong to use "root" as the cgi user, but this
would have been a lot easier to diagnose if the line had been

     my $uid = (getpwnam("$dwwwcfg{'cgiuser'}"))[2] ;
     defined $uid or die "User $dwwwcfg{'cgiuser'} does not exist\n";
     $uid or die "You DON'T want to run the dwww CGI script as root!\n";

(with the last line present or absent according to how much babysitting
we want the maintainer script to do).

-- 
Henning Makholm


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