Bug#766459: debootstrap: should not try to configure

[Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es>]

[ Trimming Cc list completely. After this email there is little more I
  have to say about this ].

On Mon, 27 Oct 2014, Michael Tautschnig wrote:

> Admittedly, all that *I* want is a working debootstrap, so I'm also ok just
> having the changes in base-files for now (or maybe also in debootstrap).

I already tried to fix this problem yesterday in base-files by making
minor changes. It didn't work.

And it didn't work because contrary to what some people in this thread
has suggested, this issue has *absolutely* nothing to do with recent changes
in base-files. Most probably, this is what happened:

debootstrap in wheezy installs base-passwd and base-files in the same dpkg run.

The order in which base-files and base-passwd are configured is not
defined in policy so it may depend on the dpkg version, which is
almost like saying that it could be random.

At this moment dpkg in jessie and sid are quite different, so most likely:

dpkg in jessie happen to configure base-passwd first, and it works.
dpkg in sid happen to configure base-files first, and it fails.

So I could be wrong, but this (recent changes in dpkg) is most likely
the real reason this didn't bite us before.


So please next time a simple "chown root:root" fails, let us not kill
the messenger, ok? It has been quite disappointing to me to see so
many fingers wrongly pointing at base-files, when base-files was never
to blame for this.

Thanks.