There is an ongoing issue with balloon3-config which has led to more
and more of the balloon3-config workload being relocated to the
rootfs-config script used in the rootfs generation by multistrap.

balloon3-config currently contains files, important files
like /etc/fstab, in such a way that *if* balloon3-config is purged,
those files are completely removed by dpkg. It is a bit hard to
continue using the balloonboard with no /etc/fstab, no /etc/inittab,
no /etc/modules and no /etc/network/interfaces.

There is no need for these files to be in a package, multistrap and
rootfs-config can create them easily enough. The only remaining issue
is the root password.

I've been trying various methods to get passwd and shadow to accept a
statically defined root password which exists PRIOR to the first time
that shadow is configured. Each time, shadow carefully and studiously
ignores the preset value and either comes up with one of it's own (i.e.
random) or a blank one. The blank one lets you in (so that it can be
changed) but that needs to be once-per-installation - the random ones
means going into >boot flash, mounting /mnt/root, chroot /mnt/root and
change it from there.

I am seeking a change to shadow for Squeeze so that it can use a
debconf value as a pre-seeded value (the udeb currently does this but
the runtime package does not). Once that is done, balloon3-config can
go away (grip-config will also go away at a similar point as it's
work is now done by multistrap and emdebian-archive-keyring).

In the meantime, I'm testing changes to the multistrap configs to
support pre-seeding the debconf values for tzdata and putting the
firmware files into the rootfs-config script instead of
balloon3-config.

-- 


Neil Williams
=============
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