Package dependency problems

[John G Heim]

I'm setting up an FAI install for Ubuntu 19.10. I have it installing 
only about 50 packages during the initial install. Immediately after the 
reboot, it runs fai softupdates to install everything else. So I am 
already doing a lot to avoid my current problem. That problem is that 
something is making it try to install the package chromium-browser. In 
Ubuntu 19.10, this is done by something called snap which doesn't work 
and which I do not want to mess with. I just want to make it go away.

Anybody know of an easy way to figure out which package has a dependency 
upon chromium-browser? I went through my list of packages and none of 
them look very likely. They are mostly utilities like eject  and wget. 
Of course, it takes only one package that has a list of 20 dependencies 
and each of those with 20 dependencies to get the initial install to 
blow up.

Also, is there a way to separate some package installs from the rest? 
What can happen is that the install hangs or fails due to some package 
being misconfigured. If that happens before it installs the kernel, the 
machine won't even boot. If I could get it to install justjust the 
packages absolutely necessary to boot, that would be helpful.

It seems what happens normally is that FAI collects all the packages 
listed in all the appropriate files in your package_config directory. It 
makes one gigantic list of those packages and lops through installing 
them in chunks of like 500 at a time. I want to do one chunk, before it 
installs anything else, with just the packages that will allow it to boot.



-- 
John G. Heim; jheim at math.wisc.edu; 608-263-4189