Package: debian-installer Version: 20190702+deb10u8 Severity: important Tags: d-i
In a preseed file I accidentally had a space before a comment character, which caused my preseed to fail in unexpected ways. I could not find anythying that stood out in the documentation (e.g. https://www.debian.org/releases/buster/amd64/apbs04.en.html or https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/apbs03.en.html) stating that this would occur. The specific example in my case looked like this: #_preseed_V1 d-i debian-installer/locale string en_AU d-i keyboard-configuration/xkb-keymap select us d-i keymap select us ... etc ... # Example of fetching a script to run #d-i preseed/run string http://10.1.2.3/my-script.sh My install was hanging and when I entered a console and looked in the syslog, it was attempting to access that script for which the IP address does not exist on my network. I finally started to understand the problem when I did this, the latter finally triggered a parse error in the installer console: #d-iWHATpreseed/run string http://10.1.2.3/my-script.sh #d-iWHATpreseed/runISstringHAPPENINGhttp://10.1.2.3/my-script.sh at this point I saw the white space, removed it and the problem went away. (I am also unsure whether "d-iWHAT" is also a bug or just some default applying if the item owner is not found) So I guess that either - whitespace is disallowed before a comment character and this should be added to https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/apbs03.en.html - it mentioned whitespace between fields but not at the start of a line - this is a bug -- System Information: Debian Release: bullseye/sid APT prefers focal-updates APT policy: (500, 'focal-updates'), (500, 'focal-security'), (500, 'focal') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Kernel: Linux 5.8.0-36-lowlatency (SMP w/8 CPU cores; PREEMPT) Kernel taint flags: TAINT_PROPRIETARY_MODULE, TAINT_OOT_MODULE Locale: LANG=en_AU.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_AU.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE= (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system) LSM: AppArmor: enabled
