package: installation-report Hi. Figuring out which package a bug belongs on in DI is harder than I had time for. I figure writing up experience is more valuable than simply ignoring the problem. Andy copied because he was interested when I talked to him in person. My friend Matt (copied) was trying to install Buster 10.0R0 onto a VM running on Virtualbox on a Mac using amd64 DVD 1 as installation media. He was proceeding fine without help until he got to selecting software to install. At that point, selecting software to install failed and gave him an option to retry. Retrying didn't help. Issue 1: What was displayed to the user gave no hint (other than to look at logs) as to what was going wrong. Issue Mac1: It's hard (Matt, Ian Jackson and I couldn't figure out how) to send shift-pageup from a mac keyboard through virtualbox to DI. There was enough random cruft that the important part of the apt error message had scrolled off the top of the screen on ctrl-alt-f4. We tried more /var/log/syslog on a console, but more in DI isn't really powerful enough to have an obvious way to get to the bottom of the file and scroll back, which is almost always what you want when something fails. What was apparently happening is that the Debconf network had two levels of cashing HTTP proxy that provided corrupted copies of the linux-image-amd64 from security.debian.org (well, really the actual image not the metapackage). Apt was complaining because the downloaded checksum didn't match the expected checksum from the package file. Apt is of course correct we didn't want to install that kernel, but DI could have made the error much more clear. Issue 2: There was no obvious way to select https mirrors for security.debian.org. In this environment, I strongly believe that would have fixed the problem. Issue 3: Matt got called off to do debconf video team stuff and we resumed the install on another network much later. Matt did run reconfigure the network. However, the base system was already installed, and /target/etc/resolv.conf had already been populated. So, since the nameserver addresses had changed we could not find security.debian.org or deb.debian.org and selecting software to install failed yet again. DNS resolution is another failure case where the user shouldn't have to look at ctrl-alt-f4. At least in this case, the error hadn't scrolled off. We worked around by copying /etc/resolv.conf into /target/etc in a shell. Issue 4: While Matt's mac was suspend (hypervisor suspended), time passed. The VM running DI didn't notice this. As a result, wall time had progressed by about 4 hours beyond what DI expected. The release file on security.debian.org was not yet valid, so security updates were not installed and DI left security.debian.org commented out in the installed system. Issue 5: The DVD apt-cdrom source got left in /etc/apt/sources.list. Some people may want this. I think a lot of people do not. I don't think users should be expected to hand edit /etc/apt/sources.list to recover from this situation.
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