Dan,

Thanks for this

On Tue, Sep 19, 2023 at 12:02:13PM -0400, dan wrote:
>
> Package: debootstrap
> Version: 1.0.128+nmu2devuan2
>
> invoking
> # debootstrap excalibur /mnt/devuan6
>
> leads to output of in terminal
>
> W: Failure trying to run: chroot "/mnt/devuan6" dpkg --force-overwrite
> --force-confold --skip-same-version --install
> /var/cache/apt/archives/adduser_3.137_all.deb
> /var/cache/apt/archives/cron-daemon-common_3.0pl1-175_all.deb
> W: See /mnt/devuan6/debootstrap/debootstrap.log for details (possibly the
> package cron-daemon-common is at fault)

It is well-known that debootstrap has issues with complex dependency
resolution. It does not resolve dependencies like apt.

Any of these options work for me:-

- debootstrap --exclude=logrotate,cron,cron-daemon-common

- debootstrap --variant=minbase

- mmdebstrap

mmdebstrap uses apt for dependency resolution specifically to get around issues like this.

I will look more into why the raw debootstrap fails, but I suspect it originates
in Debian and may be difficult for us to address in Devuan.

Mark