[Bug 1276064] Re: Installer silently ignores preseed directives

[Matt]

FWIW I get better results using a RedHat-style Kickstart file, with ks=http://blah, instead of a preseed file.
But analogously, I cannot seem to defeat the prompt about over-writing an existing LVM configuration.
Therefore I theorise this is not a problem with the pressed parser and kickstart parser separately, but is instead a problem with the honouring of the parsed directives, after the parse step is done and the difference between preseed and kickstart is irrelevant.

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Title:
  Installer silently ignores preseed directives

Status in “kickseed” package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  I'm trying to perform a fully automated installation of Ubuntu server
  on 100 Dell C8220s, by PXE booting the installer ISO then feeding it a
  preseed file over http using kernel cmdline params including (among
  others) url=http://myserver/path/ubuntu.preseed DEBCONF_DEBUG=5

  I'm unable to defeat certain prompts; it appears as if the preseed
  values are simply being ignored. This is a showstopper to Ubuntu
  deployment at scale; we cannot tolerate any interactivity whatsoever
  with 100 servers. When (if) this works, it will expand to even more
  servers.

  I've been banging my head against this for some time now, so I can
  supply a wide variety of preseed files that don't work, but which I
  think should work. I'll attach the more interesting ones to this
  report shortly.

  1. Ubuntu release: Precise, using ubuntu-12.04.3-alternate-amd64.iso

  2. Package version: whichever version of {debian,ubuntu}-installer or
  kickseed is included with the above ISO.

  3. What I expect to happen:

  3.1. Preseed directives shall either work, or fail in a debuggable way

  Preseed configuration directives generated by debconf-get-selections --installer > file, when this file is edited and fed back into the Ubuntu installation, shall either:
  3.1.a. Do what I want them to do; or
  3.1.b. Output comprehensible diagnostics on tty4, explaining why they did not work.

  For example, if I have the wrong owner name (not eg 'd-i'), the wrong
  directive name, the wrong type, or a unavailable value, tty4 shall
  show a diagnostic explaining which of these is the case.

  3.2. The selections output by debconf-get-selections --installer shall
  reflect the choices I made in an interactive installation, to enable
  me to reproduce a previous manual installation.

  4. What actually happens

  4.1. In many (but not all) cases, preseed directives neither work, nor
  output any explanation as to why they did not work that is visible to
  me. Perhaps I'm looking in the wrong places - is tty4 not the right
  place?

  4.2. debconf-get-selections --installer outputs great loads of stuff,
  which bears only a vague relation to choices I made during manual
  install.

  For example, the output contains:
  # Choices: Algeria, Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Congo\, The Democratic Republic of the, Djibouti, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania\, United Republic of, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Western Sahara, Zambia, Zimbabwe
  d-i     localechooser/countrylist/Africa        select  

  This is pointless; it won't defeat any interactive prompting, as it's missing a value. So there's no point including it in the output. It's just noise.
  Also, I already told the installer I'm in Oceania, so I was never prompted for a country in Africa. This directive thus has nothing to do with what I choe in the interactive install.

  On the other hand, the output also contains:
  partman-lvm     partman-lvm/vgcreate_parts      multiselect

  It appears to have forgotten that I selected /dev/sda1 as the sole LVM PV during the interactive install - the value is missing.
  Again, without the value, this directive doesn't do anything useful.

  I could accept this type of output if I had said 'debconf-get-
  selections --installer --all', ie asking for a sort of preseed
  template containing every possible directive. But I didn't (one
  can't).

  I currently think that rather than using a preseed file, it would be
  easier to make my own initrd which executes
  cfdisk/pvcreate/vgcreate/lvcreate/mkfs/mkswap/mount/debootstrap the
  way I want. That's pretty sad - it's easier to write one's own
  installer than to figure out how to configure the existing installer.

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