Package: debian-installer Severity: normal Dear Maintainer,
On July 12th 2017 I installed using debian-9.0.0-amd64-netinst.iso. The install was done onto a VM using VirtualBox. As far as I can tell, all went as expected. Then, on July 27th 2017, I repeated the exact same installation on another VM. I thought that the resulting system was the same, but I later found that the 'mail' command was missing. This led me to look at installed packages on both VM's, and I found that 19 packages were missing from the new VM, even though I did the same steps in the installation. This is the diff between a plaintext list of packages on the first VM and the list of packages on the second VM: 50,53d49 < exim4 < exim4-base < exim4-config < exim4-daemon-light 68d63 < guile-2.0-libs:amd64 134d128 < libfribidi0:amd64 136d129 < libgc1c2:amd64 146d138 < libgsasl7 167d158 < libkyotocabinet16v5:amd64 174d164 < libltdl7:amd64 178d167 < liblzo2-2:amd64 181,182d169 < libmailutils5:amd64 < libmariadbclient18:amd64 196d182 < libntlm0:amd64 213d198 < libpython2.7:amd64 270,271d254 < mailutils < mailutils-common 278d260 < mysql-common 299d280 < psmisc I also installed 3 more VMs that day, to see if the problem was intermittent. All of the four VMs had the same result. I used the following selections when doing the installs: *Language: English *Country: Canada *Keyboard: American English *Hostname: debian#, where # has been a number from 1-5, Domain: local *root password, username and password identical between installs *Timezone: eastern *Partitioning: Guided-use entire disk, all files in one partition *Mirror: ftp.ca.debian.org, blank field for proxy, popcon=no *Software Selection: only "SSH Server" and "Std System Utilities" *GRUB installed to MBR I believe that in the span of those 15 days, those packages were removed by somebody from the list of packages that the NetInstaller should install. I see this as a bug because the packages removed are important to the overall functioning of an installed system. (some of them relate to mail and so the system's mail capability is compromised until the packages are installed by the user) Further, upon noticing that debian.org had a new ISO for the NetInstaller, I downloaded debian-9.1.0-amd64-netinst.iso and installed 3 more VMs, using different mirror selections incase the problem was the one mirror I had been using so far. The three new VMs were installed using the same selections as before, but having selected ftp.ca.debian.org, mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca and debian.mirror.netelligent.ca for each VM, respectively. I am therefore fairly sure that this is not a mirror-specific problem and that the package set has actually been changed accross the board. To be clear, I am not claiming that the packages themselves have been removed from the mirrors. In fact I can successfully install all 19 missing packages manually myself using the same mirror that the NetInstaller did. I am saying that the lists, dependency database or whatever it is, the metadata about installing has been changed so that the NetInstaller will not download or install the affected packages. I believe that I am reasonable in expecting that the NetInstaller does not suddenly omit important packages with time. I can understand adding packages to the list of to-be-installed, but not removing them. Please look into this. Thanks, ajhlinuxuser -- System Information: Debian Release: 9.1 APT prefers stable APT policy: (500, 'stable') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Kernel: Linux 4.9.0-3-amd64 (SMP w/1 CPU core) Locale: LANG=en_CA.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_CA.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_CA:en (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)