Package: tomcat8 Version: 8.5.16-1 Hi, I'm forwarding this as it was reported to Ubuntu but affecting both of us. In the postinst there is a snippet already considering debconf for names:
db_get tomcat8/username && TOMCAT8_USER="$RET" || TOMCAT8_USER="tomcat8" db_get tomcat8/groupname && TOMCAT8_GROUP="$RET" || TOMCAT8_GROUP="tomcat8" [...] chown -R $TOMCAT8_USER:adm /var/log/tomcat8 /var/cache/tomcat8 chmod 750 /var/log/tomcat8 /var/cache/tomcat8 Not sure if that can be reasonably combined, but would it make sense to you to combine that with dpkg-statoverride [1] somehow? That would be to allow a user to override those permissions and retain them across update/installs/reinstalls. [1]: https://manpages.debian.org/wheezy/dpkg/dpkg-statoverride.8.en.html -- Christian Ehrhardt Software Engineer, Ubuntu Server Canonical Ltd