On Mon, 1 May 2023 at 17:53, Cyril Brulebois <k...@debian.org> wrote: > > James Addison <j...@jp-hosting.net> (2023-05-01): > > I understand that line of thinking, but we note that we have already > > received feedback on Salsa[1] from a user whose Bookworm installation > > workflow has been affected, and confirmed that the reported problem > > exists. > > And that user mentioned hostname=unassigned-hostname which would be > addressed if we were to implement what I mentioned?
Yep, fair point! > Initially it looked like specific values were expected to lead to a > particular behaviour, but if we've been encouraging people to expect > *any* fallback values specified there, that's indeed another story. > > (I had mentioned before “unassigned-hostname” wasn't to be seen in any > packages but “unassigned-domain”/“unnassigned-domain” definitely have > some specific handling.) I do see that guestfs-tools references[1] them, and I suppose other downstream software could do as well. But within the installer's components, I don't think that they have any special meaning. > I have some pending yet unrelated things to investigate on the preseed > side; I'm not sure I'll want to be testing each and every possible > combination (esp. tweaking the configuration of the DHCP server behind > the virtualization layer), but I should be able to test the water. Totally reasonable, yep. I'll try to get familiar with the process of rebuilding the installer's initrd. Currently I think that a relevant patch should: * Unset the hostname, or set the hostname to '(none)', so that the installer's netcfg ignores[2] and is unaware of an install-time hostname. * Within env2debconf, attempt to find a hostname specified on the kernel command-line: * The parameter may appear as a 'hostname=value', or 'hostname?=value' key=value pair. * The parameter must appear strictly before any '---' delimiter_ in the line. * If a hostname was found: * Create a local 'hostname' variable within the env2debconf' script containing the hostname's value. * Ensure that the 'seen' flag is assigned appropriately: * The value should be empty if the hostname was matched using 'hostname=value'. * The value should be non-empty if the hostname as matched using 'hostname?=value'. * If no hostname was found: * Do nothing. As I wrote up those criteria, they expanded and became more complicated than I initially realized, so perhaps there could be further hidden complexity here. I'll do my best to prepare and test a patch anyway. [1] - https://sources.debian.org/src/guestfs-tools/1.48.3-4/customize/hostname.ml/?hl=125#L129 [2] - https://sources.debian.org/src/netcfg/1.185/dhcp.c/?hl=578#L580