preinst fails in d-i

[Robie Basak]

A Quantal netinst failed with "Failure while unpacking required packages. This will be attempted up to five times.". As (I presume) this is priority critical, it breaks my automated installation.

Note: I'm using a custom ARM machine, and I hacked d-i to get this far. But Steve thought this could be a general Ubuntu bug so asked me to report it :)

May 18 20:44:57 debootstrap: Selecting previously unselected package makedev.
May 18 20:44:57 debootstrap: Unpacking makedev (from .../makedev_2.3.1-91ubuntu1_all.deb) ...
May 18 20:44:57 debootstrap: update-rc.d: using dependency based boot sequencing
May 18 20:44:57 debootstrap: Can't exec "insserv": No such file or directory at /usr/sbin/update-rc.d line 402.
May 18 20:44:57 debootstrap: update-rc.d: error: insserv rejected the script header
May 18 20:44:57 debootstrap: dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/makedev_2.3.1-91ubuntu1_all.deb (--unpack):
May 18 20:44:57 debootstrap: subprocess new pre-installation script returned error exit status 255

[Robie Basak (racb)]

stgraber pointed out that he can reproduce this in plain debootstrap, and I have confirmed that I get this too (armhf for me). I've attached debootstrap output and var/log/bootstrap.log

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement (jibel)]

Setting to critical, it is blocking automated installations.

[Robie Basak (racb)]

It looks like makedev is being unpacked *before* sysv-rc. If sysv-rc is providing /etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, it's too late for update-rc.d to see it when run from makedev's preinst. But sysv-rc is not marked Essential, so isn't it invalid for makedev to assume that update-rc.d will work?

I think there a few options here:

1) It looks like makedev's preinst calls update-rc.d to manage an old upgrade path that predates Lucid. So do we need to support it at all? What if we ripped that part out?

1b) Alternatively does the preinst need to run update-rc.d if it is not upgrading from an older version? If $2 is empty, can we skip the upgrade path handling, since if makedev was previously purged then the conffiles it's removing should have been deleted anyway? Or is this a fix for a bug where an old version failed to remove the conffiles on purge? As this would predate Lucid, do we care?

2) update-rc.d could be updated to test for insserv and assume legacy bootordering if it is not available.

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

the issue is that the preinst scripts for the base system are run in lexical order, with makedev coming before sysv-rc - so while /usr/sbin/update-rc.d has been unpacked on the system, the preinst has not been run and therefore makedev's invocation fails with this error.

The update-rc.d invocation was failing before anyway, it's just that now in precise, the makedev preinst script is set -e where before it was not, so the update-rc.d failure is being caught.

So we should fix makedev to not call update-rc.d - certainly not in this case, where it can't possibly be relevant.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package makedev - 2.3.1-91ubuntu2

---------------
makedev (2.3.1-91ubuntu2) quantal; urgency=low

  * debian/preinst: don't call update-rc.d remove on initial installation of
    the package; this is unnecessary, and causes problems for bootstrap
    because insserv is deliberately unavailable. LP: #1001460.
 -- Steve Langasek <email address hidden> Wed, 23 May 2012 13:59:08 -0700