Bug#1141909: tech-ctte: dh_installtmpfiles-generated dependencies

On Sun, 12 Jul 2026 at 22:27:12 +0200, Gioele Barabucci wrote:
>perhaps this request for advice should be extended to 
>dh_installsysusers-generated dependencies as well.

sysusers is perhaps less likely to become transitively Essential, 
because if a system user is needed by Essential packages, we might as 
well put it in base-passwd instead, as we did for non-Essential but very 
popular packages like apt and sudo. (Unless of course the base-passwd 
maintainer wants to use sysusers.d to create the basic users, which I 
think some more-systemd-centric distros like Arch do, but I haven't seen 
any sign of that happening in Debian.) So it might end up having 
intentionally different behaviour because the conditions are different.

But I agree that it does seem worth bearing in mind - if the tradeoffs 
are sufficiently similar, then using the same approach would make sense.

>Maybe a trigger-based solution could work better than a 
>maintscripts-based one? For examples removing issues like 
>order-of-installation or init-is-installed-vs-is-running.

Would that work? I'm not sure it would, because triggers queue up 
actions for later, but when a package has a systemd service or LSB init 
script, we need everything to happen in the proper sequence: sysusers.d 
first, then tmpfiles.d to create files/directories (which might be owned 
by the newly-created user), and finally (re)start the service (which 
will often need the newly-created user and/or the newly-created 
files/directories).

     smcv