Package: multistrap Version: 2.2.9 Severity: normal multistrap appears to not follow the Debian policy when dealing with preinst scripts.
https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/#summary-of-ways-maintainer-scripts-are-called > The package will not yet be unpacked, so the preinst script cannot rely onn > any files included in its package However, if I am judging things right, multistrap unpacks all the selected packages into their target location, before it then goes and runs all the available preinst scripts. So multistrap is not really following the "pre" here. Many preinst scripts are written based on the Debian policy, intended to be run before unpack. For example, use multistrap's stretch.conf but add "addimportant=true". The end result will have /etc/vim/vimrc.tiny.dpkg-bak instead of /etc/vim/vimrc.tiny. This situation happens due to vim-common's preinst script trying to clean up an old version of this file (it now got moved to vim-tiny). For a new install the preinst script would normally do almost nothing here, because it would bail out after seeing that /etc/vim/vimrc.tiny doesn't exist at all (the package has not yet been unpacked). But in this case, since multistrap has unpacked it first, the behaviour is different (and not as the Debian policy intended). I believe multistrap's preinst/unpack behaviour needs to be revisited based on Debian policy and behaviour of apt/dpkg. -- System Information: Debian Release: 9.1 APT prefers stable APT policy: (500, 'stable') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Kernel: Linux 4.13.0-17-generic (SMP w/4 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C (charmap=ANSI_X3.4-1968), LANGUAGE=C (charmap=ANSI_X3.4-1968) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Init: unable to detect Versions of packages multistrap depends on: ii apt 1.4.8 ii libconfig-auto-perl 0.44-1 ii liblocale-gettext-perl 1.07-3+b1 ii libparse-debian-packages-perl 0.03-2 ii perl 5.24.1-3+deb9u2 multistrap recommends no packages. Versions of packages multistrap suggests: pn fakeroot <none> -- no debconf information
