Am Mon, Feb 22, 2021 at 02:48:27PM +0100 schrieb Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues: > Hi, > > let me first reply to this, then to your initial bug. > > (...) > > Yes, debconf is one of the big blockers for chrootless working well for a > larger set of packages. Also see this: > > https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Dpkg/Spec/InstallBootstrap > > If you find time adding DPKG_ROOT support to debconf, that would be great! > > Currently, only a limited number of packages installs successfully in > chrootless mode. Namely, this works: > > mmdebstrap --mode=chrootless --variant=custom \ > > --include=bsdutils,coreutils,debianutils,diffutils,dpkg,findutils,grep,gzip,hostname,init-system-helpers,ncurses-base,ncurses-bin,perl-base,sed,tar > \ > unstable /dev/null > > The above uses --variant=custom because the essential set doesn't work with > DPKG_ROOT yet. > > Thanks! > > cheers, josch
Thanks josch for the explanations! I'll also split my answer in two parts. Though I have no idea what needed to be fixed in debconf or what is the actual cause of it: Reading dpkgs log (and even stracing into it), it does not seem that it had touched debconf beside reading its control file? How does a "normal" fix for DPKG_ROOT looks like? Is it the maintainer script needs fixing when they use an absolute path (like debconf does; but as said earlier, I dont get a "error in (pre|post)inst)" but a failure after it has loaded the control file)? Is it all the programs needs to honor DPKG_ROOT (IOW would massive patching of sources be required, even outside of the Essential set? Or could dpkg "divert" syscalls to open and friends, eg by a LD_PRELOAD call so that the host programs will end up in the "chrootless"? (But maybe let me expand on my use case: I'm not really needing the "no chroot" feature, but the "use hosts apt/dpkg" would be useful. I'm trying to provide a PoC for an embedded IoT-like device, trying to show that Debian could be an alternative for the devices I'm helping developing. The device is quite memory constrained and there are concerns about having dpkg/apt on the device, so I was shooting at the feature to use the hosts dpkg/apt only. (B-plan would be to remove apt and dpkg in the cleanup step, but my experiments started with chrootless) -- Cheers, tobi
