found: 4.6.1-3+deb13u1 found: 4.8-3 schroot, by default, copies /etc/group from the host. Because of the use of statoverride, this immediately breaks any installation attempt with apt, given that my host does not use chrony, nor is it guaranteed that any host does. dpkg: unrecoverable fatal error, aborting: unknown system user '_chrony' in statoverride file; the system user got removed before the override, which is most probably a packaging bug, to recover you can remove the override manually with dpkg-statoverride E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2) # dpkg-statoverride --list root crontab 2755 /usr/bin/crontab _chrony _chrony 750 /var/lib/chrony _chrony _chrony 750 /var/log/chrony Removing these entries, or setting setup.nssdatabases= in the schroot .conf for the chroot, allows installation to continue, albeit at the potential cost of other functionality with the chroot. These checks don't look like they should be done by dpkg, and should be done by an init/startup script provided by the package. Alternatively it should be safe to assume that the package installer has done its job and these directories are created correctly. I don't know if Chrony is even useful in a schroot, but Ubuntu Stonking includes it now by default. This may be subject to change as Stonking is not yet released. (But perhaps this is an Ubuntu problem for Ubuntu to deal with.)
Hi, I didn't check *any* details of chrony, but for an other package I considered using systemd-tmpfiles support (see tmpfiles.d(5)) to ensure permissions of directories (don't be fooled by the name). (Apparently doesn't work on hurd though). Paul
Hi Ken, Le 2026-06-13 00:22, Ken Sharp a écrit : https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1101001 This issue is a schroot limitation. From schroot-faq(7): Why is schroot overwriting configuration files in the chroot? By default, schroot copies over the system NSS databases (‘passwd’, ‘shadow’, ‘group’, ‘gshadow’, ‘services’, ‘protocols’, ‘networks’, and ‘hosts’, etc.) into the chroot. The reason for this is that the chroot environment is not a completely separate system, and it copying them over keeps them synchronised. However, this is not always desirable, particularly if installing a package in the chroot creates system users and groups which are not present on the host, since these will disappear next time the databases are copied over. The suggested workaround here is to disable the copying. This may be achieved by setting the setup.nssdatabases key to be empty in schroot.conf. In prior schroot releases, this was done by commenting out the NSSDATABASES file for the chroot (/etc/schroot/default/config by default). The database list may also be customised by editing the file containing the database list (/etc/schroot/default/nssdatabases by default). In the future, we will be working on a better scheme for keeping the host and chroot databases in sync which can merge entries rather than overwriting the entire database, which would preserve chroot-specific changes. As aforementioned, you can filter which system databases you want to copy into the chroot by editing /etc/schroot/default/nssdatabases instead of setting "setup.nssdatabases=" in schroot.conf. Cheers, Vincent
Hi Ken, Le 2026-06-13 00:22, Ken Sharp a écrit : https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1101001 This issue is a schroot limitation. From schroot-faq(7): Why is schroot overwriting configuration files in the chroot? By default, schroot copies over the system NSS databases (‘passwd’, ‘shadow’, ‘group’, ‘gshadow’, ‘services’, ‘protocols’, ‘networks’, and ‘hosts’, etc.) into the chroot. The reason for this is that the chroot environment is not a completely separate system, and it copying them over keeps them synchronised. However, this is not always desirable, particularly if installing a package in the chroot creates system users and groups which are not present on the host, since these will disappear next time the databases are copied over. The suggested workaround here is to disable the copying. This may be achieved by setting the setup.nssdatabases key to be empty in schroot.conf. In prior schroot releases, this was done by commenting out the NSSDATABASES file for the chroot (/etc/schroot/default/config by default). The database list may also be customised by editing the file containing the database list (/etc/schroot/default/nssdatabases by default). In the future, we will be working on a better scheme for keeping the host and chroot databases in sync which can merge entries rather than overwriting the entire database, which would preserve chroot-specific changes. As aforementioned, you can filter which system databases you want to copy into the chroot by editing /etc/schroot/default/nssdatabases instead of setting "setup.nssdatabases=" in schroot.conf. Cheers, Vincent
Thanks Vincent. I always search for existing bugs before reporting. I have no idea why I missed this.
Le 2026-06-13 18:25, Ken Sharp a écrit : You probably missed it because that bug report has been closed.