[Pkg-shadow-devel] Bug#345651: passwd package should be essential?

[Kurt Roeckx]

Package: passwd
Version: 1:4.0.13-7
Severity: important

Hi,

I'm wondering if the passwd package should be essential or not.

And I want to start with quoting some relevant portions of the
policy:

3.5. Dependencies
[...]
     Packages are not required to declare any dependencies they have on
     other packages which are marked `Essential' (see below), and should
     not do so unless they depend on a particular version of that package.
[...]
3.9.1. Prompting in maintainer scripts
[...]
     Packages which use the Debian Configuration management specification
     may contain an additional `config' script and a `templates' file in
     their control archive[2].  The `config' script might be run before the
     `preinst' script, and before the package is unpacked or any of its
     dependencies or pre-dependencies are satisfied.  Therefore it must
     work using only the tools present in _essential_ packages.[3]
[...]
7.2. Binary Dependencies
[...]
     `Depends'
[...]
          The `Depends' field should also be used if the `postinst',
          `prerm' or `postrm' scripts require the package to be present in
          order to run.  Note, however, that the `postrm' cannot rely on
          any non-essential packages to be present during the `purge'
          phase.

=====================

Currently, you can perfectly remove passwd since it's not
essential, and nothing essential has a dependency on it.

Bash used to have a dependency on passwd, but this was
removed in 3.1-1, and was replaced by one on debianutils
because of #208514.  And debianutils is essential.  I
believe a better packages for that would have been
base-passwd.

So, passwd was virtually essential because bash had a
dependency on it, but now it doesn't anymore.

So why do I think passwd needs to be essential?

There are several things in the package that one might
want to run from one of the maintainer scripts from
debconf, like useradd, groupadd, userdel, ...


Kurt