Source: preseed Followup-For: Bug #1031643 X-Debbugs-Cc: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
Hi folks, This is nitpicky, but I think there is an important-ish further detail to report. The fix applied does repopulate the 'hostname' variable so that env2debconf can read from it and place it into the 'netcfg/get_hostname'[1] preseed variable; so far, so good. However: the hostname in the running Debian installer masks the intended behaviour of 'netcfg/get_hostname', because netcfg's DHCP logic prefers[2] to read the running system's hostname, when it is non-empty. I've confirmed this behaviour by netbooting from the Bookworm RC 2 installer; DHCP configuration of a hostname is ignored when the command-line hostname is present. (note: a similar setting, 'netcfg/hostname' is available that takes precedence over DHCP[2] hostname values, but it's a separate setting, and is not our documented[3] behaviour of the 'hostname' preseed alias) Suggestions: This was found following some related documentation discussion[4] on Salsa. In that discussion, Martin Samuelsson suggests a fix that I think should work: We should (un)set the d-i system's hostname to the 'empty' hostname early in the installer session. That could happen in env2debconf -- or it could be placed even earlier in the installer scripts (since it's only relatively recently that Linux 6.0 began reading a hostname, we should be confident that d-i works OK without one configured). I'm doing some testing to confirm the fix currently. Thanks, James [1] - https://sources.debian.org/src/netcfg/1.185/dhcp.c/#L578 [2] - https://sources.debian.org/src/netcfg/1.185/debian/netcfg-common.templates/?hl=145#L160 [3] - https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/apbs02.en.html#preseed-aliases [4] - https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/installation-guide/-/merge_requests/25
