rpmbuild and upgrades

[Paul Howarth]

On Wed, 2005-08-24 at 11:25 -0500, Mike McGrath wrote:
> I'm having difficulty with building an RPM file to upgrade.  The issue
> comes when I need to add and delete a user.  In the spec file I have it
> creating the user in %pre and removing the user in %postun.  I'm using
> useradd and userdel to create and delete the user.  When I build and
> install the RPM everything works as expected, same goes when I remove
> it.  But when I do an rpm -U for an upgrade for some reason when all is
> said and done the user does not exist.  Anyone know what's going on?

What exactly do you have in the %pre and %postun scripts?

It's actually considered good practise now *not* to remove the user on
uninstall - there may still be files on the system belonging to that
user, and if the user is deleted, the UID can be reused by a new user,
who may "inherit" the leftover files.

Paul.
-- 
Paul Howarth <paul at city-fan.org>