[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#1040790: installation-reports: ID in /etc/machine-id and /var/lib/dbus/machine-id mismatch on fresh debian 12 installation

[Steve McIntyre]

On Tue, Jul 11, 2023 at 02:20:32PM +0100, Luca Boccassi wrote:
>On Tue, 11 Jul 2023 at 14:14, Simon McVittie <smcv at debian.org> wrote:
>>
>> Of course, d-i doesn't provide a way to not install systemd-sysv, but
>> a vocal minority of users and developers use non-default installation
>> mechanisms to get a different init system and consider that to be
>> a critically important use-case; and I'm concerned that even if these
>> users got a machine ID generated during installation, they would delete
>> it as a perceived systemd'ism, and then complain loudly in the form of
>> RC bugs when D-Bus doesn't work because /var/lib/dbus/machine-id is now
>> a dangling symlink.
>
>Well, I don't think we should make the 99.5% of cases more fragile to
>cater to an entirely hypothetical 0.5% that would actively damage
>their own installation by deleting OS files for no good reason. If
>someone wants to mess manually with /etc/machine-id and
>/var/lib/dbus/machine-id it's fair that they are allowed to do that,
>but it's also fair to tell them that they get to keep the pieces.

Agreed, 100%.

-- 
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK.                                steve at einval.com
"Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have
 nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free
 speech because you have nothing to say."
   -- Edward Snowden