Whats the deal with nologin being a shell script

[Christophe Leroy]

Le 26/06/2020 à 17:13, Eli Schwartz a écrit :
> On 6/26/20 3:26 AM, Norbert Lange wrote:
>> I am not "protesting", but worst case would be I spend some time implementing
>> said applet but for some reason it is not welcome to replace the "demo" applet.
>> It possibly a roadblock of someone providing a C replacement.
>>
>>> Feel free to persuasively argue in favor of busybox being a better piece
>>> of software if it includes a convenient nologin applet.
>>
>> Yeah, that's my opinion.
>>
>>> I'm afraid I
>>> personally am not convinced by any argument claiming it already does
>>> have one.
>>
>> I don't get that, you are not convinced because the "demo" is already
>> sufficient,
>> or you are not convinced for arguments *preventing* a C nologin applet
>> (because it already has a shell one)?
> 
> My "random user" opinion is that busybox currently doesn't have a
> nologin applet, because only C applets count (and anything else is
> unreliable vendor-specific shellscripts, regardless of whether or not
> they happen to reside inside the busybox binary).
> 
> Therefore I would be surprised and disappointed if the busybox
> maintainer rejected a patch adding one by saying "the shell one is good
> enough". As you pointed out, it requires a bunch of features such as a
> shell, which may not be desired, and for that reason alone, I would
> intuitively expect "here is a nice C version of 'nologin'" to be a
> valuable patch.
> 

But why do you need a nologin at all ?
In our systems we are just using /bin/false, that's all we need in an 
embedded system.

Christophe