On Thursday 29 December 2005 15:45, Miro Dietiker, MD Systems wrote:
> Debootstrap depends on the following (in addition to the listed in
> package!):
> - grep
> - sed
> - gzip (zcat)
> - tar
>
> I had also a dependency on "ls" (coreutils) on libattr1 which
> is not listed.
>
> What is the reason for not listing this in the package?
> It made me much work to try to run debootstrap till it cancelled
> due to missing prerequisites, building these again, rebuilding
> system and retry to boot debootstrap...
The reason is probably that these commands are so basic that they are
expected to be present on any linux/unix system.
On a Debian system at least, these commands are part of the "minimal base
system" that is always there. This also means that they do not need to be
listed as explicit dependencies for the package.
However, I do agree with you that this should be documented somewhere,
especially as debootstrap is explicitly intended to be used for
cross-platform installations.
The Debian Installation Guide has a section in an appendix [1] that
clearly needs to be updated in this respect.
The current text includes:
"The tool that the Debian installer uses, which is recognized as the
official way to install a Debian base system, is debootstrap. It uses
wget and ar, but otherwise depends only on /bin/sh. Install wget and
ar if they aren't already on your current system, then download and
install debootstrap."
This is obviously no longer true. Debootstrap was completely overhauled
not to long ago and it seems this aspect has been overlooked.
I'm CCing the debootstrap maintainer for comments. My suggestion would be
to list the commands required in the debootstrap manpage.
AJ: I would very much appreciate it if you could provide a list of
required commands so I can update this in the installation guide.
Cheers,
FJP
[1] http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/manual/en.i386/apds03.html
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