Bug#985853: debian-installer: Whitespace before a commented line in preseed file causes line to be parsed
Package: debian-installer
Version: 20190702+deb10u8
Severity: important
Tags: d-i
In a preseed file I accidentally had a space before a comment character, which
caused my preseed to fail in unexpected ways. I could not find anythying that
stood out in the documentation (e.g.
https://www.debian.org/releases/buster/amd64/apbs04.en.html or
https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/apbs03.en.html) stating that this
would occur.
The specific example in my case looked like this:
#_preseed_V1
d-i debian-installer/locale string en_AU
d-i keyboard-configuration/xkb-keymap select us
d-i keymap select us
... etc ...
# Example of fetching a script to run
#d-i preseed/run string http://10.1.2.3/my-script.sh
My install was hanging and when I entered a console and looked in the syslog,
it was attempting to access that script for which the IP address does not exist
on my network. I finally started to understand the problem when I did this, the
latter finally triggered a parse error in the installer console:
#d-iWHATpreseed/run string http://10.1.2.3/my-script.sh
#d-iWHATpreseed/runISstringHAPPENINGhttp://10.1.2.3/my-script.sh
at this point I saw the white space, removed it and the problem went away.
(I am also unsure whether "d-iWHAT" is also a bug or just some default applying
if the item owner is not found)
So I guess that either
- whitespace is disallowed before a comment character and this should be added
to https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/apbs03.en.html - it mentioned
whitespace between fields but not at the start of a line
- this is a bug
-- System Information:
Debian Release: bullseye/sid
APT prefers focal-updates
APT policy: (500, 'focal-updates'), (500, 'focal-security'), (500, 'focal')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Kernel: Linux 5.8.0-36-lowlatency (SMP w/8 CPU cores; PREEMPT)
Kernel taint flags: TAINT_PROPRIETARY_MODULE, TAINT_OOT_MODULE
Locale: LANG=en_AU.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_AU.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE= (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled
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