Source: preseed Version: 1.68 Severity: wishlist User: de...@kali.org Usertags: origin-kali
In Kali, we rely on initrd preseeding to set a bunch of Debconf entries because it's the only sane way to ensure that we have those during netboot too. Unfortunately, it makes it very hard for end-users to change some of those entries... editing initrd is not the best interface. It would be very nice if there was a way to override such preseeding with the (kernel) boot command line. Right now env-preseed runs before initrd-preseed: $ ls debian-installer-startup.d/ S30env-preseed S35initrd-preseed S60auto-install I'm not sure what is the rationale for this order but if we don't want to swap the order, then I would suggest that we introduce a new syntax that let us do this operation. I think inverting the order of both script would make a lot of sense. I tried to find reasons not to but there is no intermediary script between S30 and S35 and thus except for the precedence of preseeding, it has no other impact AFAIK. Otherwise if not possible I suggest "mirror/hostname!=http://my.mirror" as alternative syntax, somewhat mirroring the already existing ?= syntax (with the exclamation mark conveying the notion of "forcing") but I'm happy with any other syntax that you might prefer. Phil & Cyril, please share your opinions/preference as I'll probably try to implement this soonish. I track this wishlist on the Kali side too: https://bugs.kali.org/view.php?id=2143 And it's prompted by the fact that even though we set a mirror in the initrd, it would be nice if users could pick other mirrors via the command line. Example case where someone was bitten by this: https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/kernel-preseed-argument-vs-preseed-cfg-doesn%27t-work-4175534979/ -- System Information: Debian Release: stretch/sid APT prefers squeeze-lts APT policy: (500, 'squeeze-lts'), (500, 'oldoldstable'), (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable'), (500, 'oldstable'), (1, 'experimental') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Foreign Architectures: i386 Kernel: Linux 4.2.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=fr_FR.utf8, LC_CTYPE=fr_FR.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)