Bug#1059184: polkitd: Upgrade of polkitd 0.105-33 123-3 fails

[Simon McVittie]

Control: tags -1 + moreinfo

On Thu, 21 Dec 2023 at 00:33:47 +0100, thahn01 at t-online.de wrote:
> Updating an older machine which wasn't used for quite a while
> caused errors in updating polkitd
...
> + command -v systemd-sysusers
> + systemd-sysusers polkitd.conf
> Failed to check if group polkitd already exists: Connection refused

It seems there is/was a problem with one of the NSS modules used to resolve
user/group names to numeric user/group IDs on this system.

On the affected system, what NSS plugins are installed and enabled? These
commands should tell you:

    dpkg-query -W 'libnss*'
    grep -E '^(passwd|group):' /etc/nsswitch.conf

should tell you.

If you try again to upgrade polkitd, does it succeed, or does it still fail?

> APT policy: (500, 'oldoldstable'), (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')

Did you upgrade directly from Debian 10 to unstable? That isn't
a supported upgrade path: if an old machine had been running
testing/unstable before the release of Debian 10, then the supported
upgrade path would be to upgrade it to Debian 10, then 11, then 12, and
finally to testing/unstable, rebooting after each upgrade step.

Thanks,
    smcv