Bug#31449: suboptimal behavior when mounting as root already installed system

[Adam Di Carlo <adam@onshore.com>]

Package: boot-floppies
Version: 2.1.4
Severity: wishlist

If you, from withing dbootstrap, mount as root a partition (without
formatting, of course) which already has a system installed on it,
dbootstrap fails to detect this condition and take reasonable action.
On my machine, it emitted several error messages (on ttyp1 no less!)
when doing the 'Configure Device Driver Modules' step:

  can't open /lib/modules/2.0.36/modules.dep
  sed: not found
  cd: can't cd to /target/lib/modules/2.0.36

and on ttyp3:

  conf.modules: Bad file descriptor

I already had my system installed on the disk (which was mounted as
/target), and it was running 2.0.35 rather than 2.0.36, thus
the messages.  Of course another minor problem was that the error
messages weren't redirected to ttyp3.

But the major issue is that dbootstrap didn't detect that I was
trying to install on a system which wasn't in an appropriate
state.  I know that one is not supposed to do that; still, it
should catch that condition.

.....Adam Di Carlo....adam@onShore.com.....<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>