Bug#694886: debootstrap: Creates available file w/o Description fields

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>]

On Thu, May 23, 2013 at 11:02:06AM -0400, Joey Hess wrote:
> Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
> > Perhaps now, very early in the jessie release cycle, is a good time to
> > fix it.  I am not sure what is needed, otherwise I would provide a patch
> > myself.
> 
> My preferred fix would be to create an empty available file.
> 
> However, I don't understand commit 9e7d96f50df440f1ce1432e44f774799d4e5c0c0,
> which seemed to add the file to make dpkg work when resolving pre-dependencies.
> 
> Maybe Colin can shed some light on what's going on.

Oh wow, patch I wrote four years ago.  Um.  <fx: reloads state>

You can't create an empty available file because then dpkg
--predep-package won't have enough information to figure out which
pre-dependency to install next; and I don't think it makes sense to
attempt to reimplement the logic of --predep-package in the relatively
limited environment of debootstrap.  The pre-dependency handling has
been working well apart from this bug, and it would be a shame to
destabilise it.

I tried to have a look at this, but I can't actually reproduce this
myself.  Whether with the perl pkgdetails or the C one from
base-installer, debootstrap seems to create an available file with
Description fields, albeit only short ones without the extended values,
and I don't see any of these warnings from dpkg.  Do I have to do a full
d-i install to reproduce this bug?

If somebody could provide a reproduction recipe, I can have a look.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson@debian.org]