My system was hanging for over one minute at boot time when attempting to start services such as nfsmount or ypbind. I discovered that portmap was hanging when it was started as it attempts to invoke itself as user "rpc", which, on my system, in turn was attempting to look up the user "rpc" in the "passwd" NIS map, as my system was configured to resolve users first from the local passwd database then the NIS passwd database using "passwd: files nis" in /etc/nsswitch.conf. Clearly, NIS lookups would not be working at this time, as the portmapper had not yet started! The portmap daemon, /usr/sbin/portmap, should be configured to run as a user that exists in a standard installation of Gentoo Linux such as bin or daemon (option 1) or the user "rpc" should be created by default in a standard installation of Gentoo Linux (option 2). Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce:
the portmap ebuild adds the rpc user
Ironically it's applying Red Hat's rpc_user patch that inadvertently causes this nasty behavior in the first place! I currently have portmap-5b-r8 yet I had to manually add the rpc user. My system started out at Gentoo 2004.0 or 2004.1. Why would I not have the rpc user if my currently installed version should create the rpc user? Does the pkg_setup routine only get called on the first installation of a package?
yes you're also running an outdated portmap
I've just sync'd with 2004.3 and am performing an update world; -r9 is coming soon. :-) If upgrading the package is insufficient to create the required user, then lots of other people are going to be bitten by the same bug. :-( Is it possible to make this an action on every install (including upgrades)?
i interpreted your question wrong pkg_setup is run everytime that ebuild is emerged
In this case, it's a mystery why the "rpc" user wasn't created when I upgraded to -r8 some months ago. Perhaps enewuser has only been recently made available and I had an older version of portage (or its libraries). I notice a version of enewuser in eclass/eutils.eclass you wrote (found by Googling), but I'm not too sure how this gets sucked into portage and thus the ebuilds.
