[Pkg-salt-team] Bug#1008896: salt-minion needs python3-importlib-metadata to start

[Xavier G.]

Package: salt-minion
Version: 3004+dfsg1-10
Severity: important

Dear Maintainer,

On Sunday 2022-04-03, I full-upgraded my Debian bookworm/sid hosts (+ apt
autoremove --purge), all of them running salt-minion.

On some of them, salt-minion failed to restart and exhibited the following Python error;
  AttributeError: 'PathDistribution' object has no attribute '_normalized_name'
... with the exact same stacktrace as this bugreport:
  https://github.com/saltstack/salt/issues/61062

A brief look at the associated fix:
  https://github.com/saltstack/salt/pull/61064
... made me inspect whether python3-importlib-metadata was installed.

Fortunately, the correlation was obvious: all hosts where salt-minion failed to
restart lacked python3-importlib-metadata.
Installing this package and starting salt-minion.service was enough to work
around the issue. However, this is easier said than done on large
infrastructures, especially when salt-minion is down, hence the "important"
severity.
I assume python3-importlib-metadata should be added to salt-minion or
salt-common's required dependencies.

Thanks for your work.
--
Xavier G.


-- System Information:
Debian Release: bookworm/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 5.16.0-6-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU threads; PREEMPT)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages salt-minion depends on:
ii  dctrl-tools           2.24-3+b1
ii  init-system-helpers   1.62
ii  lsb-base              11.1.0
ii  python3               3.10.4-1
ii  python3-pycryptodome  3.11.0+dfsg1-3
ii  python3-systemd       234-4
ii  python3-zmq           22.3.0-1+b1
ii  salt-common           3004+dfsg1-10

Versions of packages salt-minion recommends:
pn  debconf-utils  <none>
ii  dmidecode      3.3-3
ii  e2fsprogs      1.46.5-2
ii  fdisk          2.37.3-1+b1

Versions of packages salt-minion suggests:
pn  python3-augeas  <none>

-- no debconf information