Ceph » Orchestrator

I encountered the following issue when attempting to uninstall cephadm 18.2.1 on debian bookworm:

Removing cephadm (18.2.1-1~bpo12+1) ...
deluser: In order to use the --remove-home, --remove-all-files, and --backup features,
you need to install the `perl' package. To accomplish that, run
apt-get install perl.
dpkg: error processing package cephadm (--remove):
 installed cephadm package post-removal script subprocess returned error exit status 8
dpkg: too many errors, stopping

It seems the deluser command used in the postrm-script requires perl to be installed to use these flags. Ironically, this leaves your packages broken and prevents you from installing perl without further shenanigans. Commenting out line 24 in /var/lib/dpkg/info/cephadm.postrm serves as a workaround and will let you remove the package but won't delete the user.