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Re: How to preconfigure debconf values?



On Monday 24 December 2007, Josef Wolf wrote:
> Yes, I understand.  But as tzdata is installed by debootstrap, there's no
> way to preseed it before installation.

Right.

Preseeding during debootstrap is probably never going to happen though as 
its a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem: you need to have a basic system to 
be able to preseed and debootstrap is exactly what gives you that basic 
system.

> > Reinstalling the package _without_ purging it could work.
>
> Without purging, the tzdata/Zones/Etc value is left in place, so

I doubt that the value for tzdata/Zones/Etc is the problem. As you 
change "Areas" to Europe, any value for any other area (and Etc is 
basically just another area) should be completely irrelevant.

> reinstalling still don't get the preseeded value. 

Right. So it looks as if the maintainer scripts are not doing what I hoped 
they might do. Possibly because the actual configuration files are also not 
removed without purging.

> With purging, it gets even more wired:

s/wired/weird/ I guess? ;-)

> I still don't get in completely non-interactive :-/  In addition, please
> note the broken prompt.  And I am not entirely sure I really want all of
> those packages to be removed.  But I'm curious, so I go ahead:

Non-interactive would not be expected for this. I underestimated how "core" 
tzdata is. For some other package this might have worked.

> OK, tzdata/Zones/Etc is finally gone

Again, I doubt tzdata/Zones/Etc is the problem.

> and here are my desired values.  But there's still no luck:

Right. I'm about to give up. There's probably a very good reason why we do 
the configuration manually in D-I :-)

Last suggestion I can give you if you want to find out _why_ things are not 
working as you expect them to, is to add 'set -x' in the relevant 
maintainer scripts and see what actually happens:
/var/lib/dpkg/info/tzdata.config
/var/lib/dpkg/info/tzdata.postinst

It is entirely possible that the maintainer scripts just do not support 
preseeding but that they initialize values themselves.

> I am subscribed.

OK. You may want to remove your own mail address from the Mail-Followup-To: 
header then (unless you actually prefer to receive CCs).

> But I am still not sure whether debootstrap and debconf 
> are ontopic on this list or whether this list is for d-i only.

It's borderline on-topic. It is because you're trying to do some fancy 
customized installation and because most knowledge about preseeding is to 
be found on this list. It's not because it does not really have anything to 
do with the installer itself. Guess you've gotten the benefit of the 
doubt :-)

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