[Piuparts-devel] Bug#1036705: override: adduser:admin/required

[Helmut Grohne]

Package: ftp.debian.org
Severity: normal
User: ftp.debian.org at packages.debian.org
Usertags: override
X-Debbugs-Cc: adduser at packages.debian.org, debian-boot at lists.debian.org, debian-release at lists.debian.org, josch at debian.org, deity at lists.debian.org, piuparts-devel at alioth-lists.debian.net
Control: affects -1 + src:adduser

Hi,

I am requesting to override the priority of adduser to become required.

Rationale

apt used to depend on adduser and apt is required, so adduser is
transitively required in bullseye. Johannes and myself worked towards
making apt not depend on adduser and that work succeeded. Unfortunately,
that also removed adduser from the transitively required set and now
debootstrap --variant=minbase no longer contains adduser while it
earlier did. In the mean time, packages started using deluser for postrm
purge, so they effectively assume that it was essential, which it isn't.
We've now fixed such postrm scripts to no longer do that, but we agreed
with the release team that it should be difficult to remove for bookworm
in order to make purging packages left over from bullseye just work
after and upgrade to bookworm. Originally, the idea was to add back the
dependency from apt. Instead, we made apt "Protected: yes". This still
doesn't install it by default, but makes removal difficult which is what
saves postrm purge scripts, so all should be good. Except that this
makes piuparts unhappy as it tries to remove adduser and apt being
unhappy about it. This is presently breaking testing migration for a
number of packages. So now we thought about it again and got to the
conclusion that adduser should also be Priority: required for bookworm
(and unstable until bookworm is released). Doing so is a late change, I
know. However, it gets us back to the bullseye state and in being
required, debootstrap --variant=minbase will install adduser again,
which will fix piuparts. So an we do that?

Helmut