BTW, our distribution engineers have suggesting using 'apt-rdepends' instead of 'apt-cache depends'.  I verified that works better on my system (that is, querying on bash returns libc6).
But it doesn't actually work if I put that in febootstrap_debian.ml in place of apt-cache depends.

febootstrap -v -o supermin.d --names bsdmainutils btrfs-tools cryptsetup diff e2fsprogs gfs-tools gfs2-tools grub-pc hfsplus iproute libaugeas0 linux-image nilfs-tools ntfs-3g ntfsprogs reiserfsprogs udev ufsutils util-linux vim-tiny xz-utils zfs-fuse acl attr bash libc6 binutils coreutils cpio dosfstools file findutils gawk grep gzip jfsutils lsof lvm2 module-init-tools net-tools parted procps scrub strace tar zerofree --exclude ^perl --exclude ^python --exclude ^plymouth --exclude ^linux-firmware --exclude ^kbd-misc --exclude ^file-rc
...
No candidate version found for debconf-2.0
No candidate version found for awk
No candidate version found for upstart-job
No candidate version found for linux-initramfs-tool
No candidate version found for fileutils
...
febootstrap: aptitude: error: no file was downloaded corresponding to package debconf-2.0
make: *** [stamp-supermin] Error 1


On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 11:46 AM, Richard W.M. Jones <rjones@redhat.com> wrote:
On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 11:22:01AM -0700, David Konerding wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 11:03 AM, Richard W.M. Jones <rjones@redhat.com>wrote:
>
> > On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 10:45:48AM -0700, David Konerding wrote:
> > > I see, so you're suggesting I just manually add a package to pkgs right
> > > after
> > >
> > http://git.annexia.org/?p=febootstrap.git;a=blob;f=febootstrap_debian.ml;h=4aa7389657aedf281a6aa908984a02891de801be;hb=HEAD#l47
> >
> > Yup, something like:
> >
> >  let pkgs = pkgs @ [ "libc6" ] in
> >
> >
> Thanks for all the help.  I can confirm that shoehorning libc6 in allows
> invoking init.  The next step is /bin/sh failing to run because
> libncurses.so.5 can't be loaded.

Another thing to do would be to modify the grep command here:

http://git.annexia.org/?p=febootstrap.git;a=blob;f=febootstrap_debian.ml;h=4aa7389657aedf281a6aa908984a02891de801be;hb=HEAD#l37

in order to make it include all the Depends and Pre-Depends packages
(assuming that ncurses is amongst those).

Rich.

--
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