Re: powerpc-utils and DEBIAN_FRONTEND

[Stephen R Marenka <stephen@marenka.net>]

On Sun, May 27, 2001 at 10:34:24PM -0400, Joey Hess wrote:
> Stephen R Marenka wrote:
> > The problem seems to be that hwclock.sh is a conffile and wants to
> > prompt the user about whether to override the existing file.
> > Unfortunately, we're running in non-interactive mode so the STDIN prompt 
> > fails and powerpc-utils fails to configure. I can configure 
> > powerpc-utils manually, but that isn't exactly acceptable for boot-floppies.
> 
> Well, the obvious fix is to make debootstrap run dpkg with --force-confnew.
> 
> The obvious question is, why was this conffile already present on a new
> install? Did debootstrap or some other package create it? Either could
> be gounds for a bug report. Or was debootstrap ran on a filesystem that
> already had a debian install on it? Maybe a partial install from an
> earlier failed debootstrap run?

This was a fresh install on a newly formatted partition. The symptom to
this failure shows up when the following repeat (from debootstrap/woody)
fails 20 times (because powerpc-utils hasn't configured). Perhaps that
is also a good place to add --force-confnew. Shall I file a bug?

excerpted from debootstrap/woody

info "Installing base packages"
 
repeat 20 in_target dpkg --force-auto-select --force-overwrite \
         --skip-same-version --install $(debfor $base)


Thanks a bunch!

Stephen

-- 
Stephen R. Marenka     If life's not fun, you're not doing it right!
<stephen@marenka.net>