Bug#332824: synlink strangeness with chroot

[Jonathan Brandmeyer <jbrandmeyer@earthlink.net>]

Cross-posting to the BTS since its relevant to this bug, and might lead
to closing it out.

I am running a Debian Sid AMD64 root partition alongside a full Sid i386
partition.  Right now, the 32-bit partition is used mostly as a chroot
to run openoffice and mplayer, using the directions on the Debian AMD64
howto.  I also use it as a full desktop install as a backup.

All of my "partitions" are managed using LVM.  vgchange, which is used
to initialize LVM in an initramfs, depends on libncurses.so.5 (the
binary for vgchange is actually located at /lib/lvm-200/lvm).

When you follow the FAQ directions to add an ia32 chroot's lib
directories to /etc/ld.so.conf[1], ldconfig causes vgchange's dependency
on libncurses.so.5 to appear to be satisfied using
$(chroot_path)/usr/lib/libncurses.so.5[2], which is itself a symlink.
When mkinitramfs builds the initramfs, it dereferences that symlink and
places the dereferenced file into the same location in the initramfs
image (eg, /mnt/root32/usr/lib/libncurses.so.5).  Since that location is
not on the library search path in the initramfs, vgchange fails to run,
the root fs cannot be found, and the system fails to boot.

There's a whole lot of strangeness going on here (at least to me), so I
ask the experts: Which package(s) is/are at fault?  Should the HOWTO be
changed to not recommend adding the chroot's libs to /etc/ld.so.conf?

Thanks,
-Jonathan

[1]  Mine looks like this:
/usr/X11R6/lib
# chroot i386 libs
/mnt/root32/lib
/mnt/root32/usr/lib
/mnt/root32/usr/X11R6/lib

[2] ldd /lib/lvm-200/lvm returns:
libdevmapper.so.1.02 => /lib/libdevmapper.so.1.02 (0x00002aaaaabc3000)
libreadline.so.5 => /lib/libreadline.so.5 (0x00002aaaaacd4000)
libselinux.so.1 => /lib/libselinux.so.1 (0x00002aaaaae13000)
libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x00002aaaaaf26000)
libncurses.so.5 => /mnt/root32/usr/lib/libncurses.so.5
(0x00002aaaab029000)
libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x00002aaaab186000)
/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00002aaaaaaab000)

Weirdly, file -L /mnt/root32/usr/lib/libncurses.so.5 prints
... ELF 64-bit LSB shared object, AMD x86-64 ...