Bug#1120513: dh_installsysusers overrides documented configuration mechanisms

[Valentin Kleibel]

Dear Maintainers,

> 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.

Unfortunately I did not receive any explanation on why systemd-sysusers 
calls are handled this way.
Digging some more i can find related bugs filed against systemd:
#1029785 marked as a wishlist as it requests honorig settings from 
unrelated configfiles
#1076837 is similar but contains no comment regarding the issue i 
brought up and has no reply from systemd maintainers since Jan 2025.

To my understanding the way systemd-sysusers is called in postinstall 
scripts still ignores the configured settings documented for it:

>> 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.

Thanks for your work,
Valentin