On Sun, 12 Jul 2026 at 22:27:12 +0200, Gioele Barabucci wrote:
perhaps this request for advice should be extended to
dh_installsysusers-generated dependencies as well.
sysusers is perhaps less likely to become transitively Essential,
because if a system user is needed by Essential packages, we might as
well put it in base-passwd instead, as we did for non-Essential but very
popular packages like apt and sudo. (Unless of course the base-passwd
maintainer wants to use sysusers.d to create the basic users, which I
think some more-systemd-centric distros like Arch do, but I haven't seen
any sign of that happening in Debian.) So it might end up having
intentionally different behaviour because the conditions are different.
But I agree that it does seem worth bearing in mind - if the tradeoffs
are sufficiently similar, then using the same approach would make sense.
Maybe a trigger-based solution could work better than a
maintscripts-based one? For examples removing issues like
order-of-installation or init-is-installed-vs-is-running.
Would that work? I'm not sure it would, because triggers queue up
actions for later, but when a package has a systemd service or LSB init
script, we need everything to happen in the proper sequence: sysusers.d
first, then tmpfiles.d to create files/directories (which might be owned
by the newly-created user), and finally (re)start the service (which
will often need the newly-created user and/or the newly-created
files/directories).
smcv
