Part of the process of building the base disks involves installing all of the base packages on an "alternate root", that is using the "--root" argument of "dpkg" to set its idea of the root to the directory in which I'm building the base.
When I do this, I see a lot of messages about not being able to kill network daemons, /proc not being mounted, etc. Also, daemons are probably being started when it isn't appropriate. However, I do want to execute the pre-inst and post-inst scripts because most of the work they do is useful and necessary to build correct base disks. I think we should agree on an environment variable that I can set to tell the pre- and post-inst scripts not to start of kill daemons. Would "DEBIAN_NO_DAEMONS=1;export DEBIAN_NO_DAEMONS" be an appropriate thing to use? Thanks Bruce -- See Pixar's "Toy Story", at a theatre near you starting November 22.