Dear systemd maintainers, The polkitd postinst script invokes systemd-sysusers, and relies on it being functional, under the sole condition that this binary is present; in Debian this is equivalent to the systemd package being installed since /bin/systemd-sysusers is in that package.
Is this a correct assumption or is there an additional condition for systemd-sysusers to be functional that the polkitd postinst script should be checking before invocation? I hit a scenario where it doesn't work, and makes the installation (configure phase) of polkitd fail, due to the necessary user not being created. I traced that back to systemd-sysusers trying to connect to /run/systemd/userdb/io.systemd.DynamicUser On all my Debian machines, that socket exists but nobody is listening on it. A polkitd maintainer argues that systemd should be listening on it, and on his machine it does. The stdout/stderr of the invocation looks like: $ sudo systemd-sysusers polkitd.conf Failed to check if group polkitd already exists: Connection refused but the return value is 0, which would indicate success. But the user that should be created is not created. At least this seems to be a bug in systemd-sysusers; according to usual interface, and as documented in its man page, if it failed to perform its job, it should return non-zero. What is your take on this? You can see the history of the discussion in bug #1074789 https://bugs.debian.org/1074789 systemd version 252.26-1~deb12u2 on amd64, and systemd-userdbd is not installed. Thanks in advance, -- Lionel Mamane
