On Fri, Jul 10, 2026 at 11:57:09AM +0300, Adrian Bunk wrote:
On Thu, Jun 18, 2026 at 12:06:46AM +0200, Guillem Jover wrote:
I was updating a chroot, and I got systemd pulled in automatically due
to the dh_installtmpfiles misc:Depends values.
The order seems wrong, because if the system already uses systemd then
the systemd dependency does not need to be first, but if the system does
not use it (or does not need any init system at all), having it first
will pull it in, which in case of chroots, that's a significant size
and dependency increase.
So the small implementations should go first, and the last one should
be systemd.
...
I am raising the severity due to the following:
https://buildd.debian.org/status/logs.php?pkg=gimp&ver=3.2.4-3
...
Unpacking libtss2-tcti-cmd0t64:amd64 (4.1.3-6) ...
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of libtss2-tcti-cmd0t64:amd64:
libtss2-tcti-cmd0t64:amd64 depends on tpm-udev (>= 4.1.3-6); however:
Package tpm-udev is not configured yet.
libtss2-tcti-cmd0t64:amd64 depends on libtss2-mu-4.0.1-0t64 (>= 3.0.1); however:
Package libtss2-mu-4.0.1-0t64:amd64 is not configured yet.
dpkg: error processing package libtss2-tcti-cmd0t64:amd64 (--configure):
...
What happened is that libselinux got recompiled with the new debhelper
Depends: systemd | systemd-standalone-tmpfiles | systemd-tmpfiles,...
resulting in a circular dependency
libselinux1 -> systemd -> libmount1 -> libselinux1
CCing the libselinux maintainer, since one option that's separate from
the wider debhelper question might be for it to sed that dependency out
of misc:Depends. After all, it apparently didn't have any such
dependency before this change, and libselinux1 is special due to being
pseudo-Essential, so this is a little different from the general
question of what order the alternatives ought to go in.
Thanks to Jochen Sprickerhof, here's an easy local reproducer:
mmdebstrap --variant=apt --chrooted-customize-hook="sed -i 's/testing/unstable/'
/etc/apt/sources.list; apt -Uy upgrade" testing /dev/null
--
Colin Watson (he/him) [[email protected]]
