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

[Jeremy Bícha]

On Mon, Sep 1, 2025 at 8:29 AM Vincent Lefevre <vincent at vinc17.net> wrote:
> On 2025-09-01 13:55:55 +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> > Note that I don't know *when* this symbolic link has been removed
> > (unfortunately, the logs don't say anything about it). So it could
> > have potentially been done by the purge of tracker-extract while
> > this symbolic link is now managed by localsearch. So, a bug in the
> > old tracker-extract package.
>
> I could reproduce the issue after removing localsearch and
> reinstalling tracker-extract/stable (3.8.2-4+b1).
>
> If both localsearch and tracker-extract are upgraded to 3.8.2-6 and
> tracker-extract 3.8.2-6 is purged afterwards, then the symbolic link
> is preserved.
>
> But if tracker-extract is removed without being upgraded first
> (this occurs with aptitude, which detects that tracker-extract
> is no longer needed from dependencies[*]), then the symbolic link
> is removed when tracker-extract is purged. So this is a bug in
> either localsearch 3.8.2-6 or tracker-extract 3.8.2-4.

Before today, I had not used aptitude in many years. I was unable to
figure out how to trigger the behavior you saw with aptitude. Please
provide detailed instructions for how to reproduce this.

I am uploading localsearch 3.8.2-8 to Unstable now and it will quickly
migrate to Testing. In this version, I have moved the files from the
localsearch binary package back to tracker-extract, avoiding this
problem for people upgrading from Debian 13 to Unstable after this
version is built. Debian Testing was never affected.

I believe we ultimately do want to rename the package because nothing
in Debian 13 depends on tracker-extract directly; they all depend on
localsearch which is provided by tracker-extract. Having localsearch
go from a virtual package in Debian 13 to a transitional package in
Forky feels backwards but is a helpful mitigation that could be done
immediately. To fix the issue here, we might need to do a Debian 13
stable update to modify the maintainer scripts. I will likely need to
upload a version of localsearch with the rename to Experimental to
make it easier to reproduce the failed upgrade and fix it. Or maybe we
could use Debusine or another apt repository.

I was able to reproduce the issue with sudo apt dist-upgrade
--auto-remove --purge. However, that is not the default or typical
behavior for using apt and I think it could be risky to adjust
maintainer scripts to accommodate that use case.

Thank you,
Jeremy Bícha