On Fri, 24 Jul 2026 at 19:02:04 +0200, Hefee wrote:
For me it looks unsafe to just restart any user service while upgrading
without asking the admin (who execute the upgrade).
At least on KDE Plasma uses a lot user services and restarting them may
break the Desktop, as seen here. Restarting gpg or wireplumber service
without consent is also not a good idea, as it breaks a working user.
We've had a similar restart issue in gnome-terminal, where restarting
the user service terminates existing terminals (#1144676). The compat
level bump from 13 to 14 added this in the postinst:
│ │ │ │ +# Automatically added by dh_installsystemduser/14.3
│ │ │ │ +if [ "$1" = "configure" ] || [ "$1" = "abort-upgrade" ] || [ "$1" = "abort-deconfigure" ]
|| [ "$1" = "abort-remove" ] ; then
│ │ │ │ + if [ -z "$DPKG_ROOT" ] && [ -d /run/systemd/system ]; then
│ │ │ │ + # Here we reload synchronously, as we really need to
block in
│ │ │ │ + # order to ensure the following restart also works.
Furthermore,
│ │ │ │ + # if there is no D-Bus user session, the restart won't
work either,
│ │ │ │ + # so there's no point if falling back to signals - so
either both
│ │ │ │ + # of these operations work, or both fail.
│ │ │ │ + deb-systemd-invoke --user daemon-reload >/dev/null ||
true
│ │ │ │ + deb-systemd-invoke --user restart
'gnome-terminal-server.service' >/dev/null || true
│ │ │ │ + fi
│ │ │ │ +fi
│ │ │ │ +# End automatically added section
and this in the prerm:
│ │ │ │ +# Automatically added by dh_installsystemduser/14.3
│ │ │ │ +if [ -z "$DPKG_ROOT" ] && [ "$1" = remove ] && [ -d
/run/systemd/system ] ; then
│ │ │ │ + deb-systemd-invoke --user stop 'gnome-terminal-server.service'
>/dev/null || true
│ │ │ │ +fi
│ │ │ │ +# End automatically added section
If dh_installsystemduser had an equivalent of dh_installsystemd
--no-stop-on-upgrade --no-restart-after-upgrade (see also #837528) then
we could probably use that, but at the moment there's no such option,
and the restart is unconditional (in compat level 14). This is suitable
for many user-services, but not all user-services: it would be
destructive to restart dbus.service, a terminal emulator, or a major
desktop environment component like [email protected] or
whatever is KDE Plasma's equivalent.
(Perhaps these units should have RefuseManualStop, and perhaps if they
did it would prevent the maintainer script from restarting them - but at
the moment that configuration is far from ubiquitous, and it isn't
obvious to me whether it would have undesired side-effects.)
For now, I'm going to roll gnome-terminal back to compat level 13.
Thanks,
smcv
