Ubuntu 24.04, Debian 12, Arch and Fedora 41. OS and package-manager detection
correct on all four; --help works unprivileged; and the install report is written
end to end in a container that had never seen this code — task 1's mechanism
confirmed off the machine it was written on.
Three real findings.
--only does not isolate a step. Running --only "Core utils" still created a user
account, because ask_username and the account creation sit in the preamble above
the step framework, so everything before the first `step` runs every time. It is
defensible and it is not what the flag appears to promise.
.setup-answers travels with a copy of the tree. Correctly gitignored and 0600,
but it lives inside the repository directory, so `cp -r` carries it — a container
that had never run setup came up already knowing the username and created that
account. Nothing secret in it; it is a surprise, which in an installer is the
expensive kind.
adduser leaks its own interactive prompt ("Try again? [y/N]") on the
account-creation path. Harmless here because the run had already stopped, but a
hang on a real unattended install.
Also records what containers cannot reach: no init means systemd, netplan, ufw
and the sshd drop-ins are only verifiable as "wrote the right file"; Docker and
Postgres are untested; macOS is unreachable entirely and everything about it is
reasoned rather than executed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
