On Fri, 05 Sep 2014, Colin Watson wrote: > Doesn't seem entirely terrible. That said, this is all hopelessly > delicate. I wonder if instead it would be better for base-files to > hardcode the various IDs it uses in the postinst (UIDs: root, GIDs: > root, mail, utmp, staff), and thus sidestep this requirement entirely?
I thought about that too, but I went for the dependency because this approach will defer the problem to the next package relying on /etc/passwd in its postinst. Adding the dependency to base-files doesn't fix this either if those other packages don't have any dependency wrt base-files but it makes it a bit less likely. OTOH, looking at the log we have many packages that are configured before base-passwd (starting with libc6) and it's a wonder that none of those fail without /etc/passwd... maybe it's not a good design decision to rely on base-passwd's postinst to setup the initial /etc/passwd and we should create some sort of /usr/lib/cdebootstrap/second-stage/pre-configure.d/ that packages can use to provide some scripts that would be run in the second stage of debootstrap before trying to configure everything. I'm not familiar enough with (c)debootstrap to know if such a thing is warranted but it would seem cleaner than either of our proposed solutions. Cheers, -- Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer Discover the Debian Administrator's Handbook: → http://debian-handbook.info/get/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]

