Package: linux-base Version: 4.12 Hi. This relates to whether Perl should be a package dependency of linux-base. linux-base provides /usr/bin/linux-version which can be invoked by many things that interact with initramfs / firmware generation, kernel level build stuff. If perl is not installed, the invocation will fail. If this occurs when creating a chroot (eg via mmdebstrap as we are), this breaks the build. A workaround is to specify perl in the list of packages that get installed in the chroot.
While package linux-base does not require perl, it installs a script that if invoked will fail to run if perl is not installed. This problem goes unnoticed if installing a system from minbase or friends (because perl is pulled by something), but it shows up if doing a custom chroot build where a specific list of packages is used to seed (and therefore expected to be installed in) the chroot, along with their dependencies. perl-base is listed as Priority:required which, AFAIK, means it is absolutely mandatory. If so, why does it not get auto-installed as a dependency of at least one of the packages below when constructing a Trixie base? The same is true of Bookworm (excluding linux-sysctl-defaults). findutils dpkg libc-bin base-files base-passwd debianutils bash diffutils util-linux sed grep gzip udev e2fsprogs linux-sysctl-defaults If the above set plus initramfs-tools plus our raspberry pi kernel image is requested for install, apt fails to install all packages: Processing triggers for initramfs-tools (0.148.3+rpt2) ... /usr/sbin/update-initramfs: line 217: /usr/bin/linux-version: cannot execute: required file not found dpkg: error processing package initramfs-tools (--install): linux-version cannot be executed because there is no (perl) interpreter installed in the chroot. Adding perl-base to the above list results in a successful build. Why should this be required? If perl-base is mandatory for any Debian system, why is it not pulled in automatically by one of the above packages? At first glance, it may seem reasonable to think that base-files could be a candidate of which to mark perl-base as a dependency of. However, the above package list is able to install successfully without any linux package dependency because nothing invokes linux-base, therefore making it not mandatory in such a system (although how useful this system would be is unclear - probably not very). I would like to ask the linux-base maintainers if there should be an explicitly dependency on perl-base and if not, where should the dependency be wired? Thanks, -- Matt
