If the 'setup' RPM can't be installed, the installation shoud stop. Currently, the install continues, resulting in the 'dev' and 'MAKEDEV' packages not installing, and ending up with a system that is unbootable. If you manually install the 'dev' and 'MAKEDEV' packages by touching /etc/passwd and /etc/group, you'll end up with a system that'll boot (with some complaining), but that you'll be unable to log in to (obviously), or reboot cleanly, because there is no uid 0 user in /etc/passwd, and a ctrl-alt-del gives you "You don't exist. Go away." The only way to reboot is a hardware reboot.
This is probably a manifestation of a general RPM bug, where it only statically checks Prereq: and Requires: requirements of RPMs. If one of the packages fails to install, RPM does not notice that some requirements are no longer met and continues to install RPMs.
the new RPM transactions require an entire transaction to complete in order to be successful. This means that we should really abort the entire install in a failure like this, but instead well trudge along. We may revisit the problem later. If you've done something where the setup package isn't getting installed, you're _going_ to run into problems (for now)
Issue has been added to list of features for future releases.
How can we reproduce this problem?
I had this problem when trying to do an FTP install where I got the error that the installer was unable to set the FTP server to PASV mode. It then skipped the first package and continued merrily along. Dan.
Moving to RESOVLED - DEFERRED from CLOSED - DEFERRED
Ok this appears to have been a problem before...
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 17928 ***