RPM package doesn't run user/group creation scriptlet

[chrismooredev]

When installing the 0.4.0 release, the RPM file doesn't seem to bundle the user creation/deletion scripts at https://github.com/pendulum-project/statime/blob/main/pkg/rpm/scriptlets.toml that the built-in systemctl services reference.

Copilot suggests adding --metadata-overwrite=pkg/rpm/scriptlets.toml to the end of

statime/utils/build-release.sh

Line 51 in 9ce6055

cargo generate-rpm --payload-compress xz --package statime-linux --target "$target" --target-dir target

[chrismooredev]

Ok I did some digging... Apologies if some of this is "common knowledge" within the maintainers

The scriptlets don't seem to be referenced in this repo at all and the history is a bit of a web

• Searching GitHub for the #RPM_SYSTEMD_MACROS# sigil string found in our scriptlet leads to the archived Ploutos project's pkg-rust.yml workflow along with many other projects that copy/pasted similar workflow use.

• where they read in a vendored systemd macros definition file for older versions of systemd

  • their version goes up to v239 [CentOS 8], my system runs 252 [Fedora/Oracle Linux 9.6]
    • though I'm not sure if there were any breakages since.
  • This workflow includes the vendored RPM_SYSTEMD_MACROS replacement
  • I saw that pendulum-project forked ploutos at some point, and archived it; I didn't look into why but I do remember seeing some references to it within either statime or ntpd-rs. Seems like Ploutos was developed under the pendulum project and handed over to NLnetLabs?

• Initially, both ntpd-rs and statime implement deb/rpm packaging using NLnetLabs/ploutos@v7's pkg-rust.yml

  • 2023-04-14 - pendulum-project/ntpd-rs@6ca06bf
  • 2023-11-23 - pendulum-project/statime@17cae00
  • 2024-11-23 - pendulum-project/statime@f2ba4e7 Removed rockylinux:8 (rpm) from the build images
  • 2024-04-05 - pendulum-project/ntpd-rs@245c368 replace's ploutos's pkg-rust with discrete steps.
    • this is where we lost the RPM_SYSTEMD_MACROS replacement
  • 2024-06-06 - pendulum-project/statime@6bfceee statime ported over ntpd-rs's discrete build process

---

So this has a few things of note:

• statime and ntpd-rs are now "rolling their own" packaging process rather than reusing ploutos (why? I didn't see an obvious motivating issue/PR/commit description. Maybe I'm missing where ntpd got it from?)
• this moved from an approach building on deb and rpm systems, to only a deb system. Fine for the rustic vendored version, but moving to the "canonical" upstream seems to require an rpm system package installed to process the macro expansion properly.
• the mechanism to include our RPM scriptlets no longer exists in this repo
• ploutos' special handling for RPM_SYSTEMD_MACROS hasn't persisted in the new packaging system, so even if we included the scriptlets somehow, it would break
• there's no tests ensuring the built packages work. In this case, that the packages were built properly, the install scripts run properly, and the service starts under systemd.

I'm happy to try working and submitting a PR (that's why I did this research in the first place), but it seems complex enough a history that some direction is necessary before moving forward.