Comment 28 for bug 401056

Yes, neither of these packages should be deleting the system user on purge. It's a bad idea in the general case, and is guaranteed to break things when more than one package is using the user. Even if rsyslogd were stopped at the time, that would just mean that the sysklogd purge succeeds at the expense of rsyslogd being able to start again later! (Note that rsyslogd is probably installed *before* sysklogd is purged.)

Also a sysklogd SRU to jaunty is insufficient because the same problem will affect users upgrading from hardy to karmic+1; as well as missing any users who happen to have not upgraded sysklogd before removing it. So I think the best approach is as follows:

- fix sysklogd postrm to not call deluser.
- fix rsyslog postrm to not call deluser.
- add a one-time hack to rsyslog postinst to call sed -e'/deluser/d' /var/lib/dpkg/info/rsyslog.postrm

Michael, is this something you'd like to work on? If not, I can cook this up quickly.