Bug#502850: debian-installer: D-I fails to process some correct (!) preseed files
Package: debian-installer
Version: D-I daily build October 19, 2008
Severity: normal
Hi all,
With some (correct) preseed files, Debian Installer fails at the
"Download debconf preconfiguration file" step, with the message:
"Failed to process the preconfiguration file
The installer failed to process the preconfiguration file from
http://x.x.x.x/d-i/preseed/xxxxxx.di. The file may be corrupt."
debconf-set-selections -c xxxxxx.di does not give any output, so that
seems alright.
I can work around this problem by adding a couple of extra packages to
pkgsel/include in the preseed file. Suddenly the preseed file doesn't
break Debian Installer! That proves even more that the original preseed
file was okay. The diff is, of course, not more than the extra package
definitions.
Tested with VMware Server, real hardware and architecture amd64.
And now the most interesting observation: using the same preseed file,
the one that breaks, for i386... no error message anymore! So this
problem seems to be architecture-dependent.
I have had this problem for a couple of months, since at least Lenny
beta 2. With the latest daily build (October 19), this is still the
case, so I thought to share my experiences.
The problem is easily reproducible with a specially crafted preseed
file. Creating such a file is not easy, so I'll provide you one
(bad.di). I also added one with the above described work-around
(good.di).
bad.di : http://krnl.nl/bad.di
good.di : http://krnl.nl/good.di
The diff is:
$ diff bad.di good.di
160a161
> mysql-client \
If you try to install these preseed files on amd64, bad.di will break
D-I at the "Download debconf preconfiguration file" step and good.di
will probably break later when it tries to retrieve archive information,
because the network configuration won't work in all environments. For
i386, D-I will break on retrieving archive information for both bad.di
and good.di.
Posting this bug in debian-installer, because I'm not sure which
specific package this should go. Feel free to move it.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
APT prefers testing
APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.26-1-amd64 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Reply to: