Hi, A. /etc/passwd is part of base-passwd's interface and base-files is right in relying on it working at all times. Then base-passwd is rc buggy for violating a policy must. Fixing this violation is technically impossible.
I seem to have hit this same issue independently. Could you explain why "Fixing this violation is technically impossible" As far as I can see, making base-passwd not essential, only required, and then making passwd and base-files pre-depend on base-passwd the system seems to bootstrap /etc/passed and /etc/group OK. That also seems to conform to the debian policy. The oddity is that base-files and passwd only actually need to depend on base-passwd, not pre-depend on it as they only use /etc/passwd and /etc/group in the postinst scripts but the debian policy doesn't seem to consider this case. (There are also issues with mawk preventing bootstrap but again I think this is due to some missing pre-depends (or depends) as explicitly configuring mawk first before anything else, even base-passwd resolves this. But I haven't analysed exactly what is going wrong yet in that case) Regards, Tim.
