Dear Maintainer,

The transmission-daemon.postinst script [1] (from 10 years ago) is
creating an user named `debian-transmission`.

However, according to Debian Policy 9.2.1 [2], this user should probably
be named `_transmission` instead:

This section mentions "new" usernames, so since this user has been used
for 10 years already I am not sure it applies 100%. I am also not sure
how a migration from this previous user to the new one could happen.

Feel free to mark this as wontfix if you think it is too much hassle, I
am reporting this to empty my head about this problem and to make it
visible in the BTS.

Thanks.

Agathe.

[1] https://salsa.debian.org/debian/transmission/-/blob/debian/sid/debian/transmission-daemon.postinst?ref_type=heads
[2] https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-opersys.html#introduction

Hi,

Account Handling in Maintainer Scripts[1] is of not much help here
unfortunately.

[1] https://wiki.debian.org/AccountHandlingInMaintainerScripts

The implementation would probably by like:
- add a conditional
      usermod --login _transmission debian-transmission
  in the postinst
- rename systemd unit and init script user accordingly

The advantage of this would be to better comply with the policy and have common
administration rules for all daemons.

The disadvantages of this would include:
- breakage of tutorials referencing the daemon user (there are many permission
  issues for transmission-daemon users, notably the download directory!)
- breakage of user scripts referencing the daemon user, user crontabs
- make package downgrades painful

This may generate some manageable support requests and bug reports.

Not sure what to do. Need more input to decide: other examples, etc.

Thanks,

Alex

[..]

The pragmatic action is to do nothing for users that were created
before the policy was changed to `_underscore`.

Chris

2025-10-06 17:20 CEST, Chris Hofstaedtler:

Thanks for the clarification, marking as wontfix.