ubuntu-desktop-minimal should depend on cryptsetup, lvm2

[Peter]

The meta-packages ubuntu-desktop-minimal / ubuntu-minimal depend on everything needed for a functioning desktop / server installation respectively. Well, almost everything.

Two packages that they don't depend on, but should, or at least it should recommend them are:
- cryptsetup
- lvm2

The reason is that if Ubuntu was installed with disk encryption and/or LVM turned on, these packages are essential. The system won't even boot without cryptsetup, for example (found this out the hard way).

The release of Ubuntu you are using: 22.10
The version of the package you are using: ubuntu-desktop-minimal 1.497

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

Could you provide exact steps for how you installed Ubuntu where it wasn't able to boot?

[Peter (vp2177)]

@jbicha
After installation, it was fine. It's just that in the process of trying to clean up leftover packages years later, I did something like:

# apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade
# apt-mark auto '*'
# apt-mark manual ubuntu-minimal
# apt-mark manual ubuntu-desktop-minimal
# apt-mark manual linux-generic
...same for some other packages I actively used...
# apt-get autopurge

After these steps, the system was left in an unbootable state because in the "autopurge" / autoremove stage, cryptsetup was uninstalled, hence it was missing from the new initrd.

I don't know if this is an "intended use case" for the ubuntu-* metapackages, but apart from cryptsetup (and lvm2 which I suspected is needed so I fortunately marked it as manual), every other package that's needed for a functioning system is actually Depended / Recommended by the combination of ubuntu-minimal and ubuntu-desktop-minimal.

(Only other exception being the kernel package but I understand the reasoning behind that.)

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

Marking all packages as 'auto' like that is not supported.

Besides cryptsetup and lvm2, there are several other packages that are available for the installer and only kept on the system if they are needed:

https://git.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-core-dev/ubuntu-seeds/+git/ubuntu/tree/ship-live

The installer also includes support for many languages but only English and the configured language is kept on the installed system.

We will likely close this bug since this is intended behavior.

[Peter (vp2177)]

I see.
"apt-mark auto '*'" may not be "supported" but it works and has been for a long time, even on Debian. If my installation wouldn't have had an encrypted root, I wouldn't have run into any issue. And I guess those with a non-encrypted setup don't need cryptsetup so in this sense ubuntu-minimal stays true to its name.