#1099842 lintian: maintainer-script-lacks-home-in-adduser recommends options that are no longer needed

#1099842#5
Date:
2025-03-08 18:59:45 UTC
From:
To:
Since adduser 3.122, `adduser --system` automatically defaults to
`--home /nonexistent` if no home directory is specified, so as requested
by the adduser maintainer in #1099086, I tried changing
dbus-system-bus-common to stop explicitly saying `--home /nonexistent`.
I was also asked to stop using --no-create-home, because in adduser 3.130
or later, there is a special case to never create /nonexistent.

However, this results in a lintian tag at error level:

and the description of that tag gives advice that contradicts what the
adduser maintainer requested:

I think this tag should probably not be emitted for adduser calls with
--system and no --home, at least not in packages that have a versioned
dependency on adduser (>= 3.130) (but adduser in Debian 12 'bookworm'
is newer than that, and we officially don't support skipping a release,
so the versioned dependency is not strictly necessary for packages
targeting trixie or later).

This means that in Lintian's test suite, adduser calls like this:

are actually fine and should not emit this tag:

adduser maintainer cc'd to give the opportunity to confirm or deny my
interpretation being correct.

    smcv