On 07/05/2023 19.50, Sebastian Ramacher wrote:
On 2023-05-07 11:07:16 +0200, Andreas Beckmann wrote:On 07/05/2023 10.49, Sebastian Ramacher wrote:#1034758 x2goserver-common x2goserver-common: fails to purge - command (deluser|delgroup) in postrm not found #1035291 desktop-autoloader desktop-autoloader: fails to purge - command (deluser|adduser) in postrm not found 2023-04-30 #1035292 debian-edu-fai debian-edu-fai: fails to purge - command (deluser|adduser) in postrm not found 2023-04-30 #1035435 webdis webdis: fails to purge - command (deluser|adduser) in postrm not found#1035284, znc, postinst, fixed in sid, needs unblock #1035436, rkdeveloptool, postinst #1034530, mrtg, postrm, fixed in sid, maybe needs unblock #1035494, moonshot-trust-router, postrm, fixed in sid, maybe needs unblock There are a few more only affecting sid.Looks like there are bunch of other packages where postrm just silently fails thanks to delgroup $bla || true or deluser $bla || true. znc is one of the examples.
Postrm does not fail in this case, it just ignores the (missing) deluser error.
Back in the old days (up to wheezy) we had ucf and adduser as "fake essential packages" in piuparts (i.e. they got installed into the minimal chroot before the test started and were not removed during the purge phase) because way too many packages were failing their postrm due to unconditional use of these. As bugs got filed and fixed, this was no longer needed since jessie. As I learned now, in stretch apt gained a dependency on adduser and such bugs started to be reintroduced since we could no longer check for them.
As https://bugs.debian.org/621833 (how to properly remove/lock/keep/... obsolete system users) is unresolved til today, the advise from the piuparts side was to skip user/group removal during purge if the respective tools are not available (i.e. use || true). Which is IMHO much better than failing to purge.
Andreas