Comment 7 for bug 110144

The part of this bug applying to /etc/network/interfaces is fixed thanks to this change, which I think is a fundamentally better approach even though it doesn't deal with releases earlier than lucid:

ifupdown (0.6.8ubuntu29) lucid; urgency=low

  * debian/postinst: if the loopback interface is missing from the config in
    /etc/network/interfaces, add it on upgrade; there is no valid use case
    for a system without localhost, and not bringing this up will cause
    upstart runlevel handling to fail. LP: #497299.

 -- Steve Langasek <email address hidden> Fri, 19 Feb 2010 20:29:32 -0800

(It's always best to keep logic regarding packages' configuration files in those packages rather than in debootstrap.)

I'm not yet sure what to do about /etc/fstab and /etc/hosts. I've confirmed at least that the proposed changes there wouldn't break the installer. The proposed /etc/hosts is probably OK. Aesthetically I feel that the proposed /etc/fstab is probably too verbose and that more documentation should be local and delegated to manual page references or whatever. In any case, though, I strongly believe that Debian and Ubuntu should behave in a semantically identical way here lest sysadmins' heads explode in confusion, so I'll forward the essence of this to Debian.