tasksel does not work if installed on a machine with no network

[Onno Benschop]

Binary package hint: tasksel

If hardy-alpha6 is installed on a machine with no network, then tasksel returns nothing, no text, no prompt, nothing.

Note: This is probably an edge case and a simple warning in the Release Notes may suffice.

Background:
  When testing hardy-alpha6 (server edition, i386) I needed to generate a list of packages that would be installed for any tasksel 'server' packages. To create the list I installed a VMware guest and removed the network adapter, to stop the installer from downloading any packages across my link.
  After the installation completed, I ran my tasksel snippet (included below) and it returned no results. Investigation indicated that the executable was installed, but nothing happened.
  I note that during installation on this guest, the installer did show a list of tasks - which I left empty.

Snippet:
  tasksel --list-tasks | grep server | while read a task b ; do tasksel --task-packages $task ; done | sort | uniq

[Daniel Hollocher (chogydan)]

maybe you needed to run sudo apt-get update first?

[Clint Byrum (clint-fewbar)]

I just tested installing Hardy in a VM with not network and tasksel works fine. Marking invalid, importance low (if it does turn out to be a real bug, Hardy is very old, and very few users will install without network).