Package: base-passwd Version: 3.5.47 Severity: wishlist Hi Colin,
I was again looking into how essential could be trimmed further and I stumbled into adduser. Technically, adduser is not transitively essential. However, apt (which isn't essential) currently depends on adduser. I consider apt essential for any practical purpose though, so I'd argue that adduser is kinda defacto essential. So if we want to remove adduser from a minimal installation, we'd have apt stop depending on it. Now apt uses it for the obvious thing: adding an _apt user. Given that this user will be present on practically all Debian systems, what would you think about adding _apt to base-passwd? The adduser package has an installed size of 849KB. This is about 1% of an essential chroot (depending on how far you trim it by other means). Doing so is not entirely trivial though. _apt is already present on Debian systems and it owns at least /var/cache/apt/archives/partial. Changing the uid to a static allocation may be impossible. On the other hand, libapt always chowns it to _apt, so maybe changing the uid is indeed harmless. I've Cced deity to get an answer here. Then technically, we'd add _apt to base-passwd and make apt.postinst skip the adduser call if _apt is present. apt can then "Depends: base-passwd (>= ...) | adduser" and have a smooth transition. A possible risk of this change is that other packages will suddenly become rc-buggy for missing a dependency on adduser as adduser is presently defacto essential. Another benefit of this change (if a static uid is allocated) is that we improve reproducible installations where currently uids may depend on configuration order. I think the following questions need answers to move forward: 1) Is there a requirement for the _apt user to have a stable uid? 2) Is it ok to include _apt in base-passwd? 3) Is it ok to have users with dynamic uids in base-passwd? Do note that update-basepasswd does not presently support keeping a previously allocated id. We'd have to extend it to support that case. Helmut
