Hi everyone!
RPM 4.19 added automatic sysuser handling [1]. In Fedora 39 this feature was not enabled right away [2] as it requires some care to properly transition to it. Also going back to 4.18 was technically still the fallback option during this change.
I just noticed in an issue in the RPM upstream repository [3] that the sysuser feature is still not enabled. May be right now might be a good time to get this going for Fedora 41. I am happy to help with the technical details but would prefer if this effort was driven from within Fedora.
Currently users are either done manually by calling useradd in scriptlets or using the macros in systemd-rpm-macros which is a sub package of the systemd package. RPM's mechanism is switched off by rpm-4.18.92-disable-sysusers.patch in the rpm package.
This whole thing probably needs to be a Global Change involving a change to the Packaging Guidelines [4] and may be an Mass Package Change (although that might be avoided by changing the macros in systemd-rpm-macros to NOPs).
Anyone interested in picking this up? I remember quite a few people being exited about this when it was announced with the rpm-4.19 Change.
Florian
[1] https://rpm-software-management.github.io/rpm/manual/users_and_groups.html [2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/RPM-4.19 [3] https://github.com/rpm-software-management/rpm/issues/3073 [4] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/packaging-guidelines/UsersAndGroups