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

[Vincent Lefevre]

On 2025-09-25 04:05:21 +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> Or from the command line (if Aptitude::Delete-Unused is set to “true”,
> which is its default):
> 
> # aptitude install --purge-unused tracker-extract
[...]
> 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.

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.

# aptitude install tracker-extract

will remove tracker-extract, but not purge it, so that the
/etc/systemd/user/gnome-session.target.wants/localsearch-3.service
symbolic link is still there.

But later (immediately after or much later), the user may want to
purge tracker-extract for cleanup:

# dpkg --purge tracker-extract

And this time, this removes the above symbolic link.

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