Bug#1142015: Please consider adding support for $DPKG_ROOT to support creating bootable Hurd systems on Linux

[Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues]

Hello Debian sysvinit maintainers, hello Matthew,

I wanted to send a friendly ping about bug #1142015 which I submitted two weeks
ago for a MR I submitted a month ago on salsa.

According to the CI pipeline of [1] this is the last remaining issue before my
patch to debvm is able to output directly bootable Debian GNU/Hurd images built
on Linux with packages directly from the archive.

Since the default value of $DPKG_ROOT is the empty string, I believe that it is
fairly trivial to verify that my patch cannot result in any functional
behaviour difference when installing the package the normal way (without dpkg
--force-script-chrootless) and should thus be safe to apply.

My exams for this semester are over now and I'd like to spend my free time on
the GNU/Hurd topic again, so I wanted to send you a ping about it.  No
pressure! :) But if you are just short on time, I can also offer to NMU
orphan-sysvinit-scripts for you.

Thank you for maintaining orphan-sysvinit-scripts!

cheers, josch

[1] https://salsa.debian.org/helmutg/debvm/-/merge_requests/39


Quoting Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues (2026-07-13 22:56:38)
> Source: orphan-sysvinit-scripts
> Version: 0.23
> Severity: wishlist
> Tags: patch
> 
> Hi,
> 
> to create a Debian GNU/Hurd chroot from Debian GNU/Linux, so called
> "chrootless" or --force-script-chrootless (the dpkg option) has to be
> used because Hurd binaries cannot be run on Linux. Since systemd cannot
> work on GNU/Hurd, sysvinit is the default init system there. To use
> sysvinit effectively, the package orphan-sysvinit-scripts is a desirable
> installation candidate.
> 
> Installing orphan-sysvinit-scripts with --force-script-chrootless
> currently fails because its postinst maintainer script does not respect
> the $DPKG_ROOT environment variable. The patch at the end of this email
> fixes this. I also opened a MR on salsa for your convenience:
> https://salsa.debian.org/matthew/orphan-sysvinit-scripts/-/merge_requests/3/diffs
> 
> The changes have been verified to have the desired results in the salsa
> CI pipeline of dpkg-root-demo:
> https://salsa.debian.org/helmutg/dpkg-root-demo/-/pipelines
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> cheers, josch
> 
> From 7195e5ee15e77fd720bf176aca2205a2bd97e851 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
> From: Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues <josch at debian.org>
> Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2026 02:31:44 +0200
> Subject: [PATCH] Add DPKG_ROOT support
> 
> ---
>  debian/postinst      |  2 +-
>  lib/update_init_d.sh | 10 +++++-----
>  2 files changed, 6 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-)
> 
> diff --git a/debian/postinst b/debian/postinst
> index 4c11f09..13a306f 100644
> --- a/debian/postinst
> +++ b/debian/postinst
> @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ set -e
>  
>  case "$1" in
>      configure|triggered)
> -       /usr/lib/orphan-sysvinit-scripts/update_init_d.sh
> +       "$DPKG_ROOT/usr/lib/orphan-sysvinit-scripts/update_init_d.sh"
>  
>         ;;
>  esac
> diff --git a/lib/update_init_d.sh b/lib/update_init_d.sh
> index b435808..11074e4 100755
> --- a/lib/update_init_d.sh
> +++ b/lib/update_init_d.sh
> @@ -25,7 +25,7 @@ while read -r systemd sysv rcd rest ; do
>         echo "Unable to parse line: $systemd $sysv $rcd $rest"
>         exit 1
>      fi
> -    if [ -e "/lib/systemd/system/$systemd" ] && [ "$action" = "add" ]; then
> +    if [ -e "$DPKG_ROOT/lib/systemd/system/$systemd" ] && [ "$action" = "add" ]; then
>         if dpkg-query -S "/etc/init.d/$sysv" >/dev/null 2>&1 ; then
>             # This file still belongs to an installed package
>             # so do nothing for now
> @@ -34,19 +34,19 @@ while read -r systemd sysv rcd rest ; do
>         ucf "/usr/share/orphan-sysvinit-scripts/$sysv" "/etc/init.d/$sysv"
>         ucfr orphan-sysvinit-scripts "/etc/init.d/$sysv"
>         update-rc.d "$sysv" "${rcd:-defaults}" >/dev/null
> -    elif [ -e "/etc/init.d/$sysv" ] && [ "$action" = "purge" ]; then
> +    elif [ -e "$DPKG_ROOT/etc/init.d/$sysv" ] && [ "$action" = "purge" ]; then
>         #Only remove scripts if we are reasonably sure we have previously
>         #registered them with ucf (to minimise user surprise)
>         if which ucfq >/dev/null; then
>             if ucfq "/etc/init.d/$sysv" | grep -q orphan-sysvinit-scripts ; then
>                 for ext in '~' '%' .bak .ucf-new .ucf-old .ucf-dist; do
> -                   rm -f "/etc/init.d/${sysv}.$ext"
> +                   rm -f "$DPKG_ROOT/etc/init.d/${sysv}.$ext"
>                 done
> -               rm -f "/etc/init.d/$sysv"
> +               rm -f "$DPKG_ROOT/etc/init.d/$sysv"
>                 ucf --purge "/etc/init.d/$sysv"
>                 ucfr --purge orphan-sysvinit-scripts "/etc/init.d/$sysv"
>                 update-rc.d "$sysv" remove >/dev/null
>             fi
>         fi
>      fi
> -done < /usr/lib/orphan-sysvinit-scripts/mapping
> +done < "$DPKG_ROOT/usr/lib/orphan-sysvinit-scripts/mapping"
> -- 
> GitLab
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