Comment 9 for bug 646901

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.

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.

Still, as we are trying to get rid of it maybe it doesn't matter that much - but it'll be confusing if the package is present but in fact its diverts aren't. I guess I can run a set of builds now and find out how much it really breaks