Bug#228692: User/group creation/removal in package maintainer scripts
On Tue, Jul 31, 2018 at 08:00:40PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> As Guillem mentioned, I as a Debian user and system administrator would
> dearly like to be able to configure Debian to delete created users when
> the package is purged. I understand the reasons why we don't think this
> is safe to do by default, but as an administrator, I care very, very
> strongly about the property that installing a package and then purging it
> should put the system back into the state it was in before the package was
> first installed. I strongly dislike packages that leave "junk" behind.
>
> I realize that the cost of this is that I cannot use system users for
> other purposes or give them ownership of files that aren't tracked by the
> package manager or maintainer scripts, and I'm quite okay with this
> tradeoff.
>
> I think Policy should say something like "created users and groups should
> not be removed by default, but may be removed on purge if the local
> administrator explicitly requests this, either for that package or as a
> system-wide default."
That could technically be achived by giving deluser a configuration file
option modifying deluser --system's behavior, defaulting in not deleting
the user.
Greetings
Marc
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