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

[Arnaud Quette]

2017-05-03 15:23 GMT+02:00 Michael Biebl <biebl at debian.org>:

> Hi Arno
>

Hi Michael

Long time no see, I hope you're doing fine


>
> 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.
>

indeed! I only intended to do a local fix for the specific dbus issue we
have.

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.
>

I was thinking about this, but prefered the more straightforward / less
time consuming focused fix.
I still keep this in mind however, since we (Eaton / 42ITy) intend to
release all our changes / mods / improvements to Debian.
In the long run, we intend to have no diff with Debian, but that can take
some time ;)


> 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.
>

makes sense. again, this is more a hotfix for a specific issue / need on
our side.
but it's interesting to get feedback and see if other peoples are facing
the same kind of things...
looking forward Simon's answer

2017-05-03 15:32 GMT+02:00 Michael Biebl <biebl at debian.org>:

>
> Looking again, it seems adduser itself does not actually depend on perl,
> I suppose it only requires perl-base, which is essential.
> Getting rid of perl-base sounds like a lot of work, as packages are free
> to rely on its functionality without having to depend on it. So you'd
> have to check a lot of packages.
>

indeed, adduser depends on perl-base not perl.
Reverse deps on adduser announces 799 packages
that's a lot more than I can handle on the little time I have currently ;)
I'll try to dig the 'adduser-noperl' approach to see if I can get something
out of this.

thanks and cheers,
Arno
-- 
Eaton Data Center Automation Solutions - Opensource Leader -
http://42ity.org
NUT (Network UPS Tools) Project Leader - http://www.networkupstools.org
Debian Developer - http://www.debian.org
Free Software Developer - http://arnaud.quette.fr
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