These groups were mostly intended as a prototype, and have lost their meaning when cockpitd was moved to the session bus. If possible, they should also be removed from a system during a package update. (This also needs https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit/pull/1235 to remove them from the Cockpit UI.)
Missed doing this for 0.25.
(In reply to Stef Walter from comment #1) > Missed doing this for 0.25. #1235 should be merged first, so it's good that 0.25 doesn't remove them yet.
Marius. I still see these groups referred to from the cockpit source code in 0.26, and also from the test/cockpit.spec.in. So I'm waiting on doing this.
Reassigning to Marius until upstream is ready.
cockpit-0.27-1.fc21 has been submitted as an update for Fedora 21. https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/cockpit-0.27-1.fc21
Package cockpit-0.27-1.fc21: * should fix your issue, * was pushed to the Fedora 21 testing repository, * should be available at your local mirror within two days. Update it with: # su -c 'yum update --enablerepo=updates-testing cockpit-0.27-1.fc21' as soon as you are able to. Please go to the following url: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2014-12659/cockpit-0.27-1.fc21 then log in and leave karma (feedback).
> If possible, they should also be removed from a system during a package update. This is not done, I think, but that is OK since the groups have now lost their meaning and whether or not they exist does not influence the behavior of Cockpit.
I don't know how to remove the groups in a safe way, without the (remote) possibility of screwing up groups that are now in use on some machine. If you have ideas, we could include it in another point release of the cockpit package.
I agree that it is best to not remove the groups. I know of no safe way to remove users or groups, they are harmless, and only people upgrading from a alpha installation should have them anyway.
cockpit-0.27-1.fc21 has been pushed to the Fedora 21 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.