Hi Dave, And thanks for the report. Dave Hibberd <hibby@debian.org> (2025-05-19): > When installing debian from RC-1 netinst on a VM, I am unable to > install the 'hamradio' blend packages with blendsel. The installation > step skips straight to the next step without downloading any files > from the repo. This is true for both graphical and text installers. Yeah, no changes are expected between both versions, what is most expected to matter is: - the image type and its contents (netinst vs. dvd) combined with connectivity: e.g. uninstallable dependencies because neither available on the mirror nor on the image; - command used to install the packages. (From memory, this is not a definitive statement.) > Running blendsel on my own machine prompts the expected response. > Trying to apt install task-hamradio-blend similarly installs packages > as I'd expect. > > The only things I can think are to blame is that there are two > applications requiring interaction through debconf (radioclk, xastir) Those packages really should (if not must, I'm not diving back into the Debian Policy) support noninteractive installation. Even outside d-i, it's way better to get a package installed but {un,mis}configured, than blocking/erroring out (probably leaving packages in some unclean state at the apt/dpkg level) if the noninteractive frontend is used, stdin pointing to /dev/null, etc. d-i itself is driving debconf, and ISTR there's some passthrough thing, but I don't recall packages asking questions when running the good old pkgsel (wrapper around tasksel), which was forked into blendsel. More on that in the final paragraph. > and something that removes systemd-timesyncd - again, I think this is > radioclk, it Recommends: ntp (>= 1:4.2.2+dfsg-1) | ntpsec | chrony blendsel uses the same logic as pkgsel, which should cope with removals, at least in theory: blendsel.pl: push @cmd, qw{apt-get -q -y -o APT::Install-Recommends=true -o APT::Get::AutomaticRemove=true -o Acquire::Retries=3 install}; And if that works in the installed system, that means a suitable combination of packages can be found (I'll leave details like “at this stage, the bootloader isn't installed yet”, that seems very improbable to be a contributing factor here). > Will blendsel in d-i choke on either debconf interactions or package > removals? Why would this have an effect before any packages have been > downloaded? It would be interesting to see what was logged, you'll find that in /var/log/installer/syslog. You can grep for blendsel (I'd imagine) or include the whole file, *compressed* (to make sure it reaches the bug tracking system and the debian-boot@lists.debian.org mailing list), using reply-all. Thanks already! Cheers, -- Cyril Brulebois (kibi@debian.org) <https://debamax.com/> D-I release manager -- Release team member -- Freelance Consultant
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