Re: base-passwd marked as Essential: yes but other packages depend on it being configured.

[Tim Woodall <debiandevel@woodall.me.uk>]

On Sun, 21 Feb 2021, Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Quoting Tim Woodall (2021-02-21 18:22:19)
> > base-passwd is marked as Essential: yes
> >
> > However, it actually creates the initial passwd and group files in the preinst
> > script.
>
> this reminds me of:
>
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=963788
>
> Would this problem not also be solved by dpkg taking care of managing
> /etc/passwd and /etc/group? If it could do that, we could solve the
> reproducibility issue in the bug above *and* base-passwd would not anymore have
> to do anything in its preinst script but could rely on dpkg doing the right
> thing, maybe helped by some new declarative statements in the package?
>
> Since dpkg 1.20.0, software like debootstrap or mmdebstrap do not anymore need
> to create /var/lib/dpkg/* or /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/ because dpkg will take care
> of it. So maybe another approach would be to also let dpkg take care of the
> initial bootstrapping stuff like making sure /etc/passwd has some sensible
> content so that software like debootstrap and mmdebstrap can rely on it?

Many thanks to both of you for pointers to those bugs. I will take a
look.

What I'm trying to do is build in a fakechroot. My idea was to unpack
the core packages, fakeroot fakechroot chroot image apt-get install apt
and have a base system to install build-deps etc.

However, apt does not configure packages in the needed order due to this
passwd/group issue.

(debootstrap does not support fakechroot minimal system and I thought
debootstrap was perl so I didn't want to try to modify it)


FYI, I have to manually touch /var/lib/dpkg/status before this as dpkg
cannot bootstrap unless this file exists. I'll have to check if I'm
using 1.20.0.


Tim.