O wiki do Debian tem uma orientação mais abrangente e específica do que o já mencionado Manual de Políticas Debian. Consulte AccountHandlingInMaintainerScripts :
The adduser program does the right thing if called with the --system option. It is thus usually only necessary to call
adduser --system $USERNAME
in your postinst to create the account with logins disabled, a primary group of nogroup and a home directory under /home. If you want other options, add them as you want to.
It should normally not be necessary to cross-check with getent whether an account already exists since adduser --system generally does the right thing. If not, please report a bug against adduser to keep your maintainer scripts simple.
O conselho que ele fornece sobre a exclusão de contas é inconclusivo. No entanto, observarei que o aconselhamento correspondente para o fedora não equivoca.
Do not remove users or groups We never remove users or groups created by packages. There's no sane way to check if files owned by those users/groups are left behind (and even if there would, what would we do with them?) and leaving those behind with ownerships pointing to now nonexistent users/groups may result in security issues when a semantically unrelated user/group is created later and reuses the UID/GID. Also, in some setups deleting the user/group might not be possible or/nor desirable (eg. when using a shared, remote user/group database). Cleanup of unused users/groups is left to the system administrators to take care of if they so desire.