[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#987862: dbus: messagebus homedir out of sync on legacy installations

[Chris Hofstaedtler]

On Tue, Mar 04, 2025 at 04:04:47PM +0000, Simon McVittie wrote:
> On Sat, 01 May 2021 at 05:50:04 +0200, Christoph Anton Mitterer wrote:
> > It seems that previously, the homedir for messagebus used to be /var/run/dbus
> > while nowadays it is /nonexistent for new installations.
> 
> Yes.
> 
> > Could some logic be added to an upcoming version, that all existing installations
> > are aligned with that?
> 
> Unfortunately, no, I don't think that's going to be possible.
> We did a similar transition in src:policykit-1, but we found that usermod
> will refuse to change the home directory of a user that is currently
> running any processes. For policykit-1, polkitd is essentially stateless,
> so we can just shut it down any time and let D-Bus activation restart it
> (with the new home directory) next time it's needed.
> 
> But if dbus is installed, then it's very very likely that the system
> bus is running (as the messagebus user), and stopping/restarting the
> system bus on a running system isn't supported/supportable, so the
> practical result is that the home directory cannot be changed by the
> maintainer scripts.

I'm CCing the adduser maintainer(s), as this seems to be an 
interesting use/edge-case.

> [..]

Chris