Bug#1080207: lxde and lxqt bookworm live images fail to install without network

[Steve McIntyre]

Package: cdimage.debian.org
Severity: important
X-Debbugs-Cc: debian-***@lists.debian.org

Found in testing of the 12.7.0 live images.

Doing a live installation using calamares from either of these images
fails if no network is available.

Running /usr/sbin/bootloader-config fails to install the appropriate
grub packages and times out after 600 seconds.

Sequence of issues:

1. /etc/apt/sources.list for the image has deb.debian.org listed above
the on-media packages. Has that changed in live-build?
2. Connman is running a DNS server on 127.0.0.1, which apt uses to
look up deb.debian.org
3. That DNS server does not fail if no network is available. Instead,
it hangs.

The bootloader-config script eventually times out and the installation
fails.

The workaround is to configure networking and then things work, but
offline installation is an important thing for some people.

[Steve McIntyre]

Testing shows that there is no sign of this issue in the equivalent
11.11 live images.

[Steve McIntyre]

Hello Steve, list,

Post by Steve McIntyre
Found in testing of the 12.7.0 live images.
Doing a live installation using calamares from either of these images
fails if no network is available.

That is an openQA-scenario that I have been working on, but did not
complete yet.

That scenario is now active in openQA.
Trixie and sid appear not to be affected.

ACK.

Post by Steve McIntyre
Running /usr/sbin/bootloader-config fails to install the appropriate
grub packages and times out after 600 seconds.

[snip]

Post by Steve McIntyre
1. /etc/apt/sources.list for the image has deb.debian.org listed above
    the on-media packages. Has that changed in live-build?

The 11.4 image (built with live-wrapper) only has deb.debian.org in
/etc/apt/sources.list
There is no difference in content of sources.list between the 12.6.0 and
12.7.0 live images.
Interestingly, the order in sources.list appears to matter.
I've recently manually tested a sid gnome image with Calamares without
network and all lines in sources.list are attempted, until one works.
Here in the 12.7.0 lxde image, if the local repository is mentioned
first, the installation of grub-efi-amd64 happens in a few seconds, no
network access is being attempted.

Yes, I would expect that to be the case.

Changing the order doesn't work for the Calamares installer, Calamares
creates its own variant of this file when installing.

Bah.

Post by Steve McIntyre
2. Connman is running a DNS server on 127.0.0.1, which apt uses to
    look up deb.debian.org
3. That DNS server does not fail if no network is available. Instead,
    it hangs.

This is a new regression. It should have failed quickly.

It turns out that 12.6 was slow as well but just made it within the 600
seconds limit, so this is not a regression as I first thought.

Hmmm. I don't remember seeing this at all when we tested 12.6. I'd
have expected testers to mention a long delay here.

In that case, there is no need to rush things, and we can try to fix it for
the 12.8 release.

Sure, that's all we can do at this point. There's at least an obvious
workaround here - just connect to a network.