reassign 222047 shadow thanks On Sun, 23 Nov 2003, Koblinger Egmont wrote:
> Package: dpkg > Version: 1.10.18 > > Currently if more unconfigured packages are being configured, their > ordered is determined by the Depends fields of the packages, however, the > Essential field is not taken into account, hence it might (and actually > does) occur that a non-essential package is configured earlier than an > essential one. > > This behaviour is against the policy that AFAIK essential packages > required by a certain package do not need to be explicitely mentioned in > the Depends field. Just one example: on a Debian 3.0 system nscd only > depends on libc6, even if its startup script requires bash, shellutils > (uname), grep and dpkg (start-stop-daemon), but these are all essential > packages. > > On a dpkg based (but not Debian) system I have a script that builds up a > chroot system: it unpacks all the required .deb files to a directory, and > later it runs "dpkg --root=... --configure -a". In most of the cases it > runs perfectly. However, I've met the following interesting situation: > building up the chroot failed if I put postgresql-server amongst the > packages. postgresql-server invokes a "su -c command otheruser" command in > its postinst script. However, su requires valid basic configuration, which > isn't available as long as shadow (and possibly some other essential) > packages are unconfigured (e.g. /etc/shells might not yet be present). The > "dpkg --configure -a" step just randomly chose to configure > postgresql-server earlier than shadow, and hence it failed. Obviously > making postgresql-server depend on shadow solved the problem, but since > shadow is an essential package, I expect that it shouldn't be necessary to > mention it in postgresql-server's Depends field, I think the postinst > script of a non-essential package could expect that essential packages are > already configured. that's a bug in shadow for not working when unpacked but not configured. essential packages must *always* work.
