Unknown maximum list size in kickstart's ks.cfg %packages

This also affects apt-get: above a certain number of packages to be installed at the same time, the installation hangs.

e.g.

    apt-get install pkg1 pkg2 pkg3 ... pkgn

I'm not sure where the cut off is.

However, it's easy to hit the limit and that makes it hard to use kickstart for setting up a full-blown workstation.

Since it also affects apt-get, that makes it impossible to do a single command install after startup.
Breaking it up over several commands works, but introduces problems if one is customizing the configurations of packages allong the way.

system-config-kickstart is just the UI for producing Kickstart files and is not itself an installer component. pkgsel is probably the relevant part of the installer.

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering is this still an issue for you? Can you try with latest Ubuntu release? Thanks in advance.

I see no reason why the status of this bug should have changed.

If the shell command line args limit is the problem, we could try to use "dpkg --set-selectios" and feed the list to it via stdin. Then "apt-get dselect-upgrade".

Is Kickstart used anywhere anymore? This bug is almost 4 years old, I think it can be closed.

Kickstart is still used. This bug has a clear description of how it might be reproduced, and I don't see why it should be closed out of hand.

I find it hard to prove to myself that dpkg --set-selections will behave just the same way - for example, I'm concerned that apt-get might feel entitled to discard one of the selections if its dependencies couldn't be resolved, rather than returning an error. It would be easier to see that the behaviour is identical if apt-get had an option to take package name input from a file. One package name per line, perhaps ignoring any lines starting with '#', would be fine.

Julian has tested passing 32941 arguments to 'apt-get install' without problems, and says that APT's command-line handling has been rewritten in the intervening time so that this is likely no longer a problem.

I tried a Kickstart file with 1149 packages (everything on the server CD). It didn't work due to conflicts, of course, but they seemed to be passed correctly to APT.

It looks like this can indeed be closed now; sorry for doubting you, Julian. Lars, if you still have a problem, please post an example Kickstart file and logs and we'll look into it.

I no longer have that lab / work environment to test in.