Re: Installing from scratch with debs

[cjw44@flatline.org.uk (Colin Watson)]

"Zack Weinberg" <zackw@stanford.edu> wrote:
>Installing debs onto a bare system proved to be harder than I'd
>thought.  Obviously you start with the Essential packages.

Isn't unpacking base2_2.tgz the easiest way to start, or has this been
obsoleted now? I agree it's less elegant.

>I ran this script for all the Essential packages and the transitive
>closure of their dependencies.  In case you're curious, these are all
>the packages which are not Essential but included in the transitive
>closure:
>
> libc6
> libcap1
> libdb2
> libncurses5
> libpam-modules
> libpam-runtime
> libpam0g
> libreadline4
> libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2

These would all be included in the admonition in policy about shared
libraries and the essential flag, presumably.

>Packages providing daemons tend to start them in their postinst.
>That's fine in most cases, but not when you're installing into a
>chroot tree and the same daemon is already running outside.  They try
>to bind their TCP socket(s), fail, and die.  Fortunately most
>postinsts don't consider this a fatal error.

I believe that Henrique Holschuh is working on this as part of his
invoke-rc.d proposal; have a look back through the archives of -devel
and -policy.

-- 
Colin Watson                                     [cjw44@flatline.org.uk]