Re: non-essential adduser poses problems to purging packages

[Helmut Grohne <helmut@subdivi.de>]

On Sun, May 07, 2023 at 08:16:14PM +0200, Julian Andres Klode wrote:
> I don't have a problem pushing a 2.6.1 out with this in the coming days. Is
> this the best solution though - maybe setting Essential on adduser might be
> easier and formally fix the issue for now.

I was also thinking that maybe it really should be essential for now.

> We generally do not expect stuff to depend on apt. This seems to be a gap
> in piuparts, that it has apt installed while testing packages.

Even if we made apt depend on adduser again, packages would still fail
purging if you removed apt and adduser beforehand. Julian also pointed
out another advantage on IRC: By using the Essential flag, we can
forcefully remove adduser while keeping apt. This option is unavailable
given a dependency.

By making it essential, we recognize the status quo and document it. We
can the proceed with retrying adduser removal in a more structured way.

I'm sorry for having messed up this transition. I failed to see it
coming.

Helmut