[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#861745: Bug#861745: dbus: Make adduser / perl Depends optional

[Michael Biebl]

Hi Arno

Am 03.05.2017 um 14:47 schrieb Arnaud Quette:

> we have a project at Eaton related to 42ITy <http://42ity.org>, which
> produce a Debian derivative for a HW appliance. For storage footprint
> reason, we've gotten rid of perl. Now, we're adding avahi, which pulls
> dbus, which pulls perl through the adduser command and Depends.
> 
> The attached patch moves adduser to Suggests, and use adduser only if
> available. It otherwise fallback to useradd.
> 
> Note: there is a small nuance between useradd and adduser: the latter tries
> to use the smallest UID/GID for system users, while the former goes top
> down from SYS_UID_MAX.
> As an example, the original dbus postinst ended up with UID/GID 146 on my
> system, while the modified has 999…

While I understand your incentive, I'm not sure this is the right
approach. There are a lot of packages requiring adduser. Adding a
fallback to every one of them doesn't seem right.

Why don't you provide a adduser package in your derivative, which does
not require perl? It could even be a small shell wrapper around useradd.

So, from my POV this bug report is a wontfix as I think it's the wrong
approach. But let's see what Simon, the main dbus maintainer, thinks.

Regards,
Michael
-- 
Why is it that all of the instruments seeking intelligent life in the
universe are pointed away from Earth?

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