[Piuparts-devel] non-essential adduser poses problems to purging packages

[Helmut Grohne]

Hi Marc,

On Wed, May 17, 2023 at 11:51:25AM +0200, Marc Haber wrote:
> Can somebody in the audience please take a look at the piuparts failure
> on salsa (https://salsa.debian.org/debian/adduser/-/jobs/4223693) and
> confirm that this might be a failure that is caused either by the
> pipeline/job being broken and/or the issue we're discussing here?

The failure here arises from piuparts trying to remove adduser and apt
refusing to do so. This confirms that our change is working as intended,
but it also makes the pipeline fail. I looked into the bullseye run on
piuparts.d.o for comparison and see that it does not attempt removing
adduser there. I suspect that adduser comes preinstalled there and thus
isn't removed. It no longer is preinstalled. Very likely, we need a
change to piuparts here to eliminiate the removal test, because we're in
the unusual situation where we don't want to install adduser
unconditionally, but once installed it shall be difficult to remove,
because doing so may break the postrm purge script of some package that
once pulled adduser.

Added piuparts-devel at alioth-lists.debian.net to Cc for help.

Helmut