Um. This is just insane. The bug is filed 22-Dec 2011, today is 09-Jul 2012, you have the actual cause, and it is still open, and the maintainers of suspected package (busybox) knows nothing about it... :(
Okay. Rui, you found the root cause of this issue, it is there: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=652946#15 The problem is that during extraction, target directory var/lock exists, and the installer tries to replace it with something else (I guess a symlink). Busybox tar does not try to remove directories in this case, to be replaced with files. So it stops there, treating it as fatal error, and does not extract remaining files, creating issues for the system running later. Whenever it is a bug in busybox tar or not is an open question. POSIX does not specify whenever it should do that or not. GNU tar tries to rmdir() the existing file if unlink()ing it returned EISDIR, and will fail only if the directory is non-empty. Ofcourse this rmdir can be added to busybox tar too, it is rather trivial. But this is not the point. The point is the presence of var/lock directory in the target system. It should not be there to start with. We're extracting a whole set of directories, and any existing directory in the target which clashes with a file in the archive we're extracting may break the extraction with any tar implementation, not just busybox one. Ie, always extract to empty target directory. Now, I've no idea how this live system works, so I can't say more. Besides, I verified - busybox tar will correctly return failure (and write accutate reason to stderr) in this case. So something else in the live installer should be broken too -- the part which loses error messages and non-zero status codes. So, to sum it all: it is a bug in the live installer, it a) calls tar incorrectly (losing exit code and stderr) and b) does not verify that the target directory is empty or at least has sane content. Thanks, /mjt -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-boot-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/4ffb2cdc.6020...@msgid.tls.msk.ru
