Bug#1120513: dh_installsysusers overrides documented configuration mechanisms

[Niels Thykier]

Control: severity -1 important

Hi Valentin,

I am CCing the systemd maintainers as they are likely to know how to 
handle this case. I am also downgrading this to non-RC, because the 
current approach is agreed with approach we agreed with the systemd 
maintainers for how to apply these configurations during installation. 
As I recall, removing the path name is not an option for another reason, 
but I do not remember which (and I am not planning to dig through the 
bug archives for it at this stage).

I have quoted the full email below my signature for the ease of the 
systemd maintainers, so they can see what the problem is and provide 
advice on how to you would apply such configuration or how we change the 
debhelper code.

Best regards,
Niels

Valentin Kleibel:
> Package: debhelper
> Severity: serious
> Version: 13.24.2
> 
> Dear Maintainer,
> 
> We recently noticed that dh_installsysusers adds lines to postinstall 
> scripts in the form of
> `systemd-sysusers ${DPKG_ROOT:+--root="$DPKG_ROOT"} <package>.conf`
> 
> systemd-sysusers provides a config mechanism to supply a range for uids 
> and gids, see manpage sysusers.d.5
> This config option only makes sense if configured for the whole system, 
> eg. in /etc/sysusers.d/00-ranges.conf.
> The above mentioned invocation of `systemd-sysusers <package>.conf` will 
> ignore such configuration as it only searches for files with the name 
> <package>.conf in the configuration paths.
> 
> To honor user provided configuration I'd suggest running systemd- 
> sysusers  without the <package>.conf argument in maintainer scripts.
> 
> Severity is serious in my opinion, as this behavior dismisses local 
> configuration opposing what was laid out in the debian policy.
> 
> Best regards,
> Valentin