Bug#924401: #924401 base-files fails postinst when base-passwd is unpacked
On Mon, Feb 22, 2021 at 07:33:10AM +0000, Tim Woodall wrote:
> As far as I can see, making base-passwd not essential, only required,
> and then making passwd and base-files pre-depend on base-passwd the
> system seems to bootstrap /etc/passed and /etc/group OK.
>
> That also seems to conform to the debian policy. The oddity is that
> base-files and passwd only actually need to depend on base-passwd, not
> pre-depend on it as they only use /etc/passwd and /etc/group in the
> postinst scripts but the debian policy doesn't seem to consider this
> case.
base-passwd is independently essential to the functioning of the system
as it currently stands, not just because base-files and passwd need it.
As such I do not consider it correct to remove the Essential flag from
base-passwd and won't be doing so.
My view on this is that policy's definition of Essential should, for the
time being, be refined to indicate that it only applies after the
package has been configured at least once. Independently, I agree with
other comments on this bug to the effect that it would be useful to
extend dpkg such that initial copies of the essential files provided by
base-passwd could be written without having to run base-passwd's
maintainer scripts (something like the ability to provide an initial
version of a configuration file without making it a full conffile),
which would then allow simplifying the process, but I see no reason to
block policy refinements on that; the policy manual is a living document
and we can always update it again later once it's possible to simplify
the bootstrapping process further.
--
Colin Watson (he/him) [cjwatson@debian.org]
Reply to: