Bug#719101: netcfg: provide a clean way to change default hostname (for derivatives)

[Raphaël Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org>]

Package: netcfg
Version: 1.110
Severity: wishlist

For Kali, we obviously wanted to have "kali" as the default hostname. Up
to now we just used to add this in preseed.cfg in our installer initrd:

# Change default hostname
d-i netcfg/get_hostname string kali
d-i netcfg/get_hostname seen false

Unfortunately this has bad side-effects such as the impossibility to
actually automate a PXE install because the "seen" flag is always reset
to false (even if we pass "hostname=kali" on the kernel command line).

That's because the preseed in the initrd is evaluated after the preseed
for the kernel command line and takes precedence over it.

Thus I would suggest to add another preseed_variable
"netcfg/default_hostname" that would be used as default value
when asking the question for "netcfg/get_hostname". The derivatives could
preseed "netcfg/default_hostname" to adjust the default hostname
and the end-users still have the possibility to preseed
"netcfg/default_hostname" to automate installs.

Would this be possible?

Cheers,

-- System Information:
Debian Release: jessie/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'stable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 3.9-1-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=fr_FR.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash