Source: apt Version: 2.5.4 Severity: serious On 2023-05-04 11:17:50 +0200, Helmut Grohne wrote: > Hi release team, > > Andreas Beckmann does wonderful QA work and recently figured that some > packages use deluser during purge (e.g. #1035494 and #1035495). deluser > is shipped with adduser and adduser used to be practically essential, > becaue apt used to depend on it, but that dependency was removed on my > request. Now apt never was essential to begin with, but having a Debian > installation without apt is a relatively rare thing. So while this was > theoretically buggy at all times, it is now practically observable.
The current list of relevant bug reports is: #1034758 x2goserver-common x2goserver-common: fails to purge - command (deluser|delgroup) in postrm not found #1035291 desktop-autoloader desktop-autoloader: fails to purge - command (deluser|adduser) in postrm not found 2023-04-30 #1035292 debian-edu-fai debian-edu-fai: fails to purge - command (deluser|adduser) in postrm not found 2023-04-30 #1035435 webdis webdis: fails to purge - command (deluser|adduser) in postrm not found Those bugs might be fixable, but is this list complete? And then there's that: > Even if we fix these bugs in the packages, people may still upgrade > their systems and remove them rather than upgrading. Then, once the > upgrade is finished (and adduser is removed), they may consider purging > them and boom things go bad without any way of us fixing those packages. > > So fixing these bugs (and probably not removing users in purge) is the > way to go, but this also raises the question of whether we want to limit > the possible damage in trixie by making adduser temporarily essential > for trixie. What do you think? I suppose you meant s/trixie/bookworm/. We are very late in the release cycle, so dear apt maintainers, please re-instante the dependency on adduser for bookworm. Once bookworm is released, removing adduser from the pseudo-essential set can be revisited. With such a change I would have expected upgrade/piuparts tests from bullseye to bookworm that tried to remove adduser a various stages and check for the fallout. Given that Andreas is only doing them now, that's too late for changes to the pseudo-essential set. Cheers > Of course, I really like small essential and want it gone, but we need > to balance that with possible breakage. > > I think this primarily is a decision that belongs to the release > managers with the default choice being "do nothing about it". > > Helmut > -- Sebastian Ramacher
