Re: non-essential adduser poses problems to purging packages

[Helmut Grohne <helmut@subdivi.de>]

Control: tags -1 + bookworm

Hi Sebastian,

On Sun, May 07, 2023 at 10:49:40AM +0200, Sebastian Ramacher wrote:
> > Even if we fix these bugs in the packages, people may still upgrade
> > their systems and remove them rather than upgrading. Then, once the
> > upgrade is finished (and adduser is removed), they may consider purging
> > them and boom things go bad without any way of us fixing those packages.
> > 
> > So fixing these bugs (and probably not removing users in purge) is the
> > way to go, but this also raises the question of whether we want to limit
> > the possible damage in trixie by making adduser temporarily essential
> > for trixie. What do you think?
> 
> I suppose you meant s/trixie/bookworm/. We are very late in the release
> cycle, so dear apt maintainers, please re-instante the dependency on
> adduser for bookworm. Once bookworm is released, removing adduser from
> the pseudo-essential set can be revisited.

I did. Thanks for correcting.

> With such a change I would have expected upgrade/piuparts tests from
> bullseye to bookworm that tried to remove adduser a various stages and
> check for the fallout. Given that Andreas is only doing them now, that's
> too late for changes to the pseudo-essential set.

I contend that:

 1. This change is in unstable since 2022-10-31, i.e. more than half a
    year.
 2. While having adduser drop from the essential+apt set is caused by
    apt dropping it, this was an implementation detail and any package
    using adduser without a dependency was (invisibly) buggy before.

So I don't quite buy the reasoning of "too late" or it being apt's
fault.

On the flip side, I think it would technically have been the
responsibility of the proponents of dropping adduser to do the testing.
The proponents have been Josch and my self and we ultimately failed to
do so. Thanks to Andreas for doing it for us.

In any case, I agree that this is a release team judgement call, so
convincing arguments are less of a concern.

Helmut