Dear Maintainers,
I am CCing the systemd maintainers as they are likely to know how to
handle this case. I am also downgrading this to non-RC, because the
current approach is agreed with approach we agreed with the systemd
maintainers for how to apply these configurations during installation.
As I recall, removing the path name is not an option for another reason,
but I do not remember which (and I am not planning to dig through the
bug archives for it at this stage).
I have quoted the full email below my signature for the ease of the
systemd maintainers, so they can see what the problem is and provide
advice on how to you would apply such configuration or how we change the
debhelper code.
Unfortunately I did not receive any explanation on why systemd-sysusers
calls are handled this way.
Digging some more i can find related bugs filed against systemd:
#1029785 marked as a wishlist as it requests honorig settings from
unrelated configfiles
#1076837 is similar but contains no comment regarding the issue i
brought up and has no reply from systemd maintainers since Jan 2025.
To my understanding the way systemd-sysusers is called in postinstall
scripts still ignores the configured settings documented for it:
We recently noticed that dh_installsysusers adds lines to postinstall
scripts in the form of
`systemd-sysusers ${DPKG_ROOT:+--root="$DPKG_ROOT"} <package>.conf`
systemd-sysusers provides a config mechanism to supply a range for
uids and gids, see manpage sysusers.d.5
This config option only makes sense if configured for the whole
system, eg. in /etc/sysusers.d/00-ranges.conf.
The above mentioned invocation of `systemd-sysusers <package>.conf`
will ignore such configuration as it only searches for files with the
name <package>.conf in the configuration paths.
To honor user provided configuration I'd suggest running systemd-
sysusers without the <package>.conf argument in maintainer scripts.
Thanks for your work,
Valentin
