Hi,

I'm working on some custom installer CDs. Now one of the goals is to install
some tasks using tasksel. So I added e.g.

tasksel tasksel/first multiselect standard, ssh-server, swedish

to overwrite default.preseed. I also added

task-ssh-server
task-swedish

to my profile.downloads file. But the resulting image does not contain all the
necessary dependencies. It includes just the plain task* packages. So the
installer requires an internet connection to fetch the dependencies (in my case
I turned off all attempts to access the network).

I wonder if all packages listed in *.downloads should be included with their
dependencies by default? IMHO it makes more sense than to just include the
plain packages because they might end up uninstallable.

PS: BTW it took my *days* to figure out why `d-i tasksel/first multiselect ...`
didn't have any effect - because default.preseed sets `*tasksel* tasksel/first
...` and that takes precendence it seems. I do wonder if default.preseed should
use the d-i prefix here.


Regards, Daniel


- -- System Information:
Debian Release: bullseye/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 5.10.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU threads)
Kernel taint flags: TAINT_OOT_MODULE
Locale: LANG=de_DE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages simple-cdd depends on:
ii  dctrl-tools         2.24-3+b1
ii  debian-cd           3.1.32
ii  lsb-release         11.1.0
ii  python3             3.9.1-1
ii  python3-simple-cdd  0.6.8
ii  reprepro            5.3.0-1.1
ii  rsync               3.2.3-3
ii  wget                1.21-1+b1

Versions of packages simple-cdd recommends:
ii  dose-distcheck  5.0.1-16+b1

Versions of packages simple-cdd suggests:
ii  qemu-system                 1:5.2+dfsg-3
ii  qemu-system-x86 [qemu-kvm]  1:5.2+dfsg-3

- -- no debconf information
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Hm. Maybe strike that. I misread some recommended packages as depends. But
still overwriting

tasksel tasksel/first multiselect standard

fails without a mirror set up. So I'm guessing some missing packages. I'm
trying to debug this further.

Regards, Daniel



- -- System Information:
Debian Release: bullseye/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 5.10.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU threads)
Kernel taint flags: TAINT_OOT_MODULE
Locale: LANG=de_DE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages simple-cdd depends on:
ii  dctrl-tools         2.24-3+b1
ii  debian-cd           3.1.32
ii  lsb-release         11.1.0
ii  python3             3.9.1-1
ii  python3-simple-cdd  0.6.8
ii  reprepro            5.3.0-1.1
ii  rsync               3.2.3-3
ii  wget                1.21-1+b1

Versions of packages simple-cdd recommends:
ii  dose-distcheck  5.0.1-16+b1

Versions of packages simple-cdd suggests:
ii  qemu-system                 1:5.2+dfsg-3
ii  qemu-system-x86 [qemu-kvm]  1:5.2+dfsg-3

- -- no debconf information
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I added this to a profiles/misc.preseed file:

  tasksel   tasksel/first multiselect
  tasksel   tasksel/first seen false
  tasksel   tasksel/tasks multiselect
  tasksel   tasksel/tasks seen false

And then it prompted for the tasksel tasks. It only displayed standard,
which the built iso image had all the dependencies for. This might be
worth testing a bit more and fleshing out the option. There's also a
tasksel/desktop that might be needed to get the desktop profiles
enabled; not sure exactly how that works.

Yeah, you'll need to specify all the packages the tasksel task needs to
make sure they're on the install media.

Packages in .downloads are somewhat treated like recommends; e.g. add
them to the install media if possible, but don't fail if they aren't
available.

Overall, profiles/*.packages are used to select packages to install with
simple-cdd instead of tasksel tasks.


I had looked into being able to specify tasksel tasks many, many years
ago and it was too complicated at the time... the idea was to create
profiles/*.tasks and then it would look up the required packages and add
them to the install media. Never figured out how to do that, and it is a
bit redundant with the simple-cdd profiles. Maybe someone else has a
better idea how to implement it or the tasksel code has changed to make
it easier now?


live well,
  vagrant