Bug#1113704: localsearch: /etc/systemd/user/gnome-session.target.wants/localsearch-3.service disappears after package rename

[Jeremy Bícha]

On Wed, Sep 24, 2025 at 10:07 PM Vincent Lefevre <vincent at vinc17.net> wrote:
> In the aptitude(8) man page, there is a warning about --purge-unused,
> which can cause data loss, because configuration files and other
> no longer used files will be removed for packages the user has not
> chosen to remove explicitly (e.g. because a "Depends" or "Recommends"
> is dropped when some package is upgraded); the user needs to confirm,
> though. However, a change of configuration due to a package rename
> like here is completely unexpected.

Thank you for referencing the aptitude manpage.
https://manpages.debian.org/aptitude I'll quote it here for reference.

 --purge-unused
If Aptitude::Delete-Unused is set to “true” (its default), then in
addition to removing each package that is no longer required by any
installed package, aptitude will also purge them, removing their
configuration files and perhaps other important data. For more
information about which packages are considered to be “unused”, see
the section “Managing Automatically Installed Packages” in the
aptitude reference manual. THIS OPTION CAN CAUSE DATA LOSS! DO NOT USE
IT UNLESS YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING!

> Actually, --purge-unused isn't even needed, and this may be seen as
> even worse, because this could be more surprising for the user, and
> more difficult to detect the issue and its cause.

I am completely unable to reproduce the test case you provided where I
first install localsearch 3.8.2-9 (currently in Salsa but will upload
soon). Then I remove tracker-extract (it has no reverse depends after
this upload and is therefore autoremovable) and then later run either
`apt purge tracker-extract` or your suggested `dpkg --purge
tracker-extract`. The symlink is still there.

Therefore, I'm going to proceed with finishing the rename of
tracker-extract to localsearch. As I wrote earlier, I think there are
issues with not completing the rename that was started in Debian 13 so
I need to finish the rename for Debian 14. aptitude has warned you not
to use the purge-unused feature unless you are prepared to identify
and fix when things don't work. I'm closing this bug because I don't
see anything else that I need to do in the localsearch packaging.

If you are dissatisfied with this, you might want to try working on
improving debhelper which provides the dh_installsystemduser
maintainer script snippets that are used automatically in the
localsearch binary package.

Thank you,
Jeremy Bícha