Comment 1 for bug 1402042

Sorry, I hadn't seen this bug so I went ahead and implemented part of the solution in d-i (well, cherry-picking changes really).

So what will happen is rather than using "--" as a separator, we can use "---" (three dashes).

So, on request from Scott; here's a quick breakdown on how the parameters passed on the command line are handled:

This already was understood by the debian-installer-utils source package, which contains a "user-params" script which takes some user parameters (but not debconf preseeds). console= is one of the user parameters taken by user-params.

All the parameters passed on the command-line make it to the installer environment; this is done, AIUI, by the kernel.

From there, the preseed source package has an env2debconf script which will take the environment variables it recognizes (containing a slash or know as aliases to some debconf variable), and ship them to debconf for the installer to use.

From that point, the installer runs. Towards the end of the installation, the grub-installer package will ask user-params for what to add to the kernel command-line when setting up the bootloader (this is also true of yaboot-installer). Other parameters relevant to the installed system go through debconf, and will get applied based on what postinst scripts do -- for instance, console-setup will carry the keymap/model settings on to the installed system's /etc/default/keyboard.