dpkg artifacts in Xenial netboot initrd.gz

[klausfiend]

I had to rebuild our rescue ramdisk (based on the vanilla upstream netboot
initrd.gz) and I noticed that our Jenkins job was now mysteriously failing
since updating to the Feb. 2019 update with this message:

cpio: ./var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend: Cannot open: Permission denied

Looks like that file got left behind in the initrd image. I checked the
others we have for U14 and U18, and the previous U16 one, and they don't
have a file by that name, so it looks like a one-off issue with the U16
version.

I verified that it's still present in the current upstream:

$ wget
http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/xenial-updates/main/installer-amd64/current/images/netboot/ubuntu-installer/amd64/initrd.gz
--2019-04-24 18:15:54--
http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/xenial-updates/main/installer-amd64/current/images/netboot/ubuntu-installer/amd64/initrd.gz
Resolving archive.ubuntu.com (archive.ubuntu.com)... 91.189.88.149,
91.189.88.161, 91.189.88.162, ...
Connecting to archive.ubuntu.com (archive.ubuntu.com)|91.189.88.149|:80...
connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 51200986 (49M) [application/x-gzip]
Saving to: ‘initrd.gz’

100%[===========================================================================================================================================================================================================================>]
51,200,986 13.0MB/s in 4.6s

2019-04-24 18:15:59 (10.6 MB/s) - ‘initrd.gz’ saved [51200986/51200986]

$ gzip -dc initrd.gz |cpio -it | grep lock-
var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend
lib/modules/4.4.0-142-generic/kernel/drivers/crypto/padlock-aes.ko
lib/modules/4.4.0-142-generic/kernel/drivers/crypto/padlock-sha.ko
bin/block-attr
230422 blocks
$ md5sum initrd.gz
75c4b41d059027aeed186adbef52d62d initrd.gz

I was able to work around it in the build process by inserting "sudo rm -fv
./var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend" to explicitly remove it, if it's there, but
ideally, it probably shouldn't be.

Hard to say what this affects, since it doesn't noticeably alter the
functionality of netboot, but it might surprise some folks.

 affects ubuntu

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. It seems that your bug report is not filed about a specific source package though, rather it is just filed against Ubuntu in general. It is important that bug reports be filed about source packages so that people interested in the package can find the bugs about it. You can find some hints about determining what package your bug might be about at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage. You might also ask for help in the #ubuntu-bugs irc channel on Freenode.

To change the source package that this bug is filed about visit https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1826300/+editstatus and add the package name in the text box next to the word Package.

[This is an automated message. I apologize if it reached you inappropriately; please just reply to this message indicating so.]

[Paul White (paulw2u)]

We are sorry that we do not always have the capacity to review all reported bugs in a timely manner. You reported this bug some time ago and there have been many changes in Ubuntu since that time.

Ubuntu 16.04 (xenial) reached end-of-life on April 29, 2021.

Do you still see a problem related to the one that you reported when using a currently supported version of Ubuntu? Please let us know if you do otherwise this report can be left to expire in approximately 60 days time.

Thank you for helping make Ubuntu better.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for Ubuntu because there has been no activity for 60 days.]