As of rootstrap 0.3.24-5, any failure in a rootstrap module triggers throwing a string exception in builder. With Python 2.6, this gets particularly annoying since the interpreter throws a TypeError ("exceptions must be old-style classes or derived from BaseException, not str") that masks rootstrap's error message.
Please find attached a patch against the builder script of 0.3.24-5 Cheers, Riccardo
--- builder.orig 2011-01-30 21:55:36.165353783 +0100 +++ builder 2011-01-30 21:57:09.315398827 +0100 @@ -67,11 +67,11 @@ elif debug_exit == 2: return - raise "rootstrap: Module '%s' failed, status %d: %s" % \ - (module,status,os.strerror(status)) + raise RuntimeError("rootstrap: Module '%s' failed, status %d: %s" % \ + (module,status,os.strerror(status))) return - raise "rootstrap: unknown module: %s\n" % module + raise RuntimeError("rootstrap: unknown module: %s\n" % module) config = ConfigParser.ConfigParser() config.optionxform = str # case sensitive