LXC natty guest failing to configure properly

When exactly do you see this? I'm not getting that error...

Though maybe my caches are not new enough. Recaching.

I debootstrapped a fresh natty (outside of lxc) and got the same behaviour. Command used:

sudo debootstrap --verbose --variant=minbase --components=main,universe --arch=amd64 --include=$packages natty deboot/

$packages is the same from lxc script

So what sort of system is this? Is it some flavour which doesn't include netbase by default?

Guess the question doesn't quite make sense. But I'm still not seeing that issue anywhere. Weird.

Is this actually a bug in debootstrap, as it seems to be not installing dependencies?

Not sure why you're not able to reproduce it .. I'm hitting this every time .. Here's a full log
http://paste.ubuntu.com/585503/
my host OS is Natty x64 updated to latest

Once I sudo chroot inside, apt-get -f install .. wants to install netbase

It is my understanding that any 'Depends:' for --include=alpha,beta packages should be automatically resolved by debootstrap UNLESS --no-resolve-deps is given. So I think what Ahmed has here is a bug in debootstrap.

If I'm off base with that, please feel free to reassign the bug to package 'lxc', with me as owner, and I"ll take Ahmed's patch. I just worry that I'll be papering over a real bug if I do that.

Interesting, I'm now getting

W: Failure while configuring base packages. This will be re-attempted up to five times.
W: Failure while configuring base packages. This will be re-attempted up to five times.
W: Failure while configuring base packages. This will be re-attempted up to five times.
W: Failure while configuring base packages. This will be re-attempted up to five times.
W: Failure while configuring base packages. This will be re-attempted up to five times.

But that is immediately followed by

I: Base system installed successfully.

and the resulting container is good.

Ah, and booted into the container,

dpkg -l | grep netbase

returns nothing.

This is fixed in natty.

Note - this is fixed in natty for lxc. That is a workaround for what I believe is a real bug in debootstrap.

I don't know why the debootstrap bug is marked 'incomplete'. I'm going to mark it 'confirmed'. Please reset if I'm wrong on that, and, if you do, re-ask for whatever info you wanted.

No bug in debootstrap. Rather, netbase's priority has changed from 'required' to 'important'. That makes the difference between minbase pulling it in.

I don't know if this should be deemed a bug in netbase or not.

Guess it's actually a dup of bug 86536.

Ok, basically resolve_deps() is broken. It gets called once with the $additional (--include=) package list. It calls 'PKGS=$PKGDETAILS GETDEPS $PKGS", in a loop while $PKGS is not empty. But pkgdetails only looks at the first package on the list at a time.

So after the first call to pkgdetails, only the first package in $PKGS was ever looked up, and all others are gone.

Which means only the first package listed ever gets its dependencies looked up.

It's worth seeing if debian's debootstrap has a fix for this. If not, I think the best fix is to change that loop so that we call pkgdetails GETDEPS for one package out of $PKGS at a time (making sure to weed out duplicates at every step of course, but this time by simply using 'without' at the end of each loop against a list of already-looked-up packages) instead of trying to overload $PKGS as it currently does.

We have exactly the same version of debootstrap as Debian.

I'm still working on reproducing this, but I'm not sure I agree with your analysis of what pkgdetails is doing. The relevant bit of code is:

        $in = 1 if (/^Package: (.*)$/ && grep {$_ eq $1} @ARGV);

and that condition is true if the text after "Package: " is equal to any element of @ARGV.

The problem is actually that it's running pkgdetails_perl GETDEPS only on the Packages file for main, but inetutils-ping is in universe so it fails to notice its dependencies.

In fact, there's a to-do comment for this very thing:

        # XXX: I can't think how to deal well with dependency resolution and
        # lots of Packages files. -- aj 2005/06/12

I've fixed this upstream, and I'll backport it:

  http://git.debian.org/?p=d-i/debootstrap.git;a=commitdiff;h=8ca6fafd9030acfc060bb9f6f83b96cb56b4a9fe;hp=92cf330c441260fa28f6277dc63823f6416e2115

This is in the queue for after beta-2.

Thanks, the fix looks sensible to me. I'll test as soon as it hits natty.

Actually, I went ahead and tested on natty. All dependencies were installed.

Perfect, thanks.

This bug was fixed in the package debootstrap - 1.0.29ubuntu1

---------------
debootstrap (1.0.29ubuntu1) natty; urgency=low

  * Cherry-pick from trunk:
    - Resolve dependencies from all requested components (LP: #740167).
 -- Colin Watson <email address hidden> Wed, 13 Apr 2011 18:48:24 +0100