Comment # 1 on bug 1191490 from Fabian Vogt

(In reply to Ancor Gonzalez Sosa from comment #0)
> YaST Users is being partially rewritten to rely on the tools of the shadow
> packages (useradd & friends) as much as possible.
> 
> One option that YaST currently offers is to create a new user with an empty
> home (that is, not copying the skel user to it). Currently useradd copies
> file from the directory specified by the SKEL configuration variable and
> also from the location indicated by USRSKEL. And there is no way to fully
> avoid that.
> 
> One may think that running this is the way to specify you want an empty home:
> 
> >  useradd --skel /var/lib/empty username
> 
> But that still copies the files from the location of USRSKEL. And there is
> no argument to influence the value of usrskel.
> 
> Not sure what the correct solution is:
> 
> 1) maybe ignoring USRSKEL as well if "--skel /var/lib/empty" (or /dev/null
> or similar) was provided
> 
> 2) maybe offering another parameter similar to "--skel" but to override
> USRSKEL.

IMO the best way is to only apply USRSKEL if SKEL is used as skel, either
implicitly or explicitly.