On Mon, 25 Jul 2022 13:05:02 +0100 Mark Hindley wrote: > It has been suggested that changing the dependency to > > systemd-standalone-tmpfiles | systemd-tmpfiles > > would help the packaging system usually find the correct solution and reduce > the > number of unexpected surprises users are reporting.
This change breaks debootstrap as expected: +--- | W: Failure while installing base packages. This will be re-attempted up to five times. | W: See /tmp/u/unstable/debootstrap/debootstrap.log for details (possibly the package /var/cache/apt/archives/systemd-standalone-tmpfiles_251.3-1_amd64.deb is at fault) +--- I hope this addresses the question for "evidence and rationale of this concern" why I say this is problematic. > With this change, on a systemd installation the dependency would already be > satisfied and therefore noop for APT. For installations without systemd, be > that > systems using other inits or in containers, APT would choose the standalone > implementation. You state this as a fact, but it is sadly false. See prior discussions about systemd-shim which had similar problems and caused various problems even after removal from the archive (because conffiles). (I'm too lazy to look this up for another repeat of this argument, after all it is your claim; I already wasted too much time on the test above.) We also had the very same discussion about dependency ordering for libpam-systemd (or default-logind these days). I don't see any substantial difference here to handle it differently. I don't think we should make dependencies more brittle by not following the policy to list the preferred package first; exploring alternatives can be done w/o doing so. Ansgar
