Comment 4 for bug 1392297

I have debugged this problem further:

The problem seems to be that the postinst script executes "invoke-rc.d resolvconf start", which indeed seems to execute the init script /etc/init.d/resolvconf during the installation of the package. There is no /usr/sbin/policy-rc.d in the target system, so the execution of the init script is not suppressed.

When running the postinst script on it's own, it moves the original /etc/resolv.conf file to /run/resolvconf/resolv.conf and links /etc/resolv.conf to it. So far so good. But when "/etc/init.d/resolvconf start" gets called as a result of "invoke-rc.d resolvconf start", the contents of /run/resolvconf get removed (resolvconf ---wipe-runtime-directories), and a new and empty resolv.conf gets created (resolvconf --enable-updates).

After that the subsequent installation steps, which try to access the network, fail.