Comment 10 for bug 646901

On Fri, Oct 01, 2010 at 02:10:58PM -0000, Wookey wrote:
> The re-install issue is that we can't run pre-insts when doing the
> initial unpacking to make a system with multistrap (because multistrap
> is designed to work for cross rootfs creation). We have to use dpkg -X
> because dpkg --unpack doesn't have a 'don't run preinsts' option.

Ah. But in that case, because the unpack ordering is not guaranteed, you
would need to reinstall *both* binutils and binutils-multiarch, because the
unpacked files could be from either package. You don't want to end up with
/usr/bin/objdump.single identical to /usr/bin/objdump!

> The only useful thing most preinsts do is run dpkg-diverts, so the re-
> install option exists to allow pre-insts to be run later once there is
> enough system to run them on and we are running on the right
> architecture. In practice this seems to work well. For cross-chroots -
> until we are happy that we can leave binutils-multiarch out, I think the
> reinstall option should stay.

Understanding now what this is meant to do, I agree that this should be kept
for the time being, though it should also have 'binutils' added to the list
of reinstalled packages if you want it to be reliable. Do you think another
upload is needed to get this into 10.10?

Long-term, I think multistrap shouldn't be ignoring the distinctions between
essential/required packages and other packages. The only packages you
should need to dpkg -X are these; a three-pass dpkg -X, dpkg --unpack, dpkg
--configure of the base system, followed by plain installation of any
additional packages, would be reliable without any need to hard-code lists
of packages that contain preinsts.

--
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Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
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