Package: polkitd
Version: 122-2
Severity: serious
Justification: maintainer says so
Tags: pending
While upgrading a bullseye GNOME system[1] to bookworm, I got this
upgrade failure:
> Setting up polkitd (122-2) ...
> Creating group 'polkitd' with GID 999.
> usermod: user polkitd is currently used by process 109547
> dpkg: error processing package polkitd (--configure):
> installed polkitd package post-installation script subprocess returned error
> exit status 8
The root cause is that we are using `usermod -d /nonexistent polkitd`
to change the polkitd user's home directory from /var/lib/polkit-1 to
/nonexistent, to avoid junk directories like /var/lib/polkit-1/.cache
being created. However, usermod quite reasonably refuses to modify a
user while they have processes running.
I think there are two things we can do to avoid this:
- try to stop polkitd before we manipulate its system user;
- add a "|| true" to this usermod command because it could be restarted
by D-Bus activation, but the usermod change isn't really critical for
existing installations
and my inclination is to do both.
smcv
