For those playing along at home, the package pmbuko is referring to can be found on the Leopard install disk at System/Installation/Packages/OSUpgrade.pkg.

It’s a new-style flat package, but we can poke around in the contents by expanding it:

pkutil –expand /path/to/OSUpgrade.pkg /Users/Shared/OSUpgrade.pkg

Now open the /Users/Shared directory and you’ll see a traditional folder-based package. Show contents and dig down, and you’ll see that it’s a payload-free package – that is – one that installs no files, but exists purely to run scripts. The script that does the NetInfo to DS upgrade is OSUpgrade.pkg/Scripts/postinstall_actions/migrateNetInfo and it looks like this:

#!/bin/sh

ROOT_DIR=”$3″

./Tools/netInfoToDS “$ROOT_DIR”

So it’s calling OSUpgrade.pkg/Tools/netInfoToDS with the path to the Volume Leopard is being installed on.

In theory, you could copy this tool and run it yourself; in my quick testing it fails if run on the currently booted volume:

./netInfoToDS /

complains about an invalid datastore during an openDatabaseForWriting call. So it won’t work as a replacement for my script, which runs on the currently booted volume. Still, if we can get it to work, it’s probably a better technique than mine – hopefully Apple has handled the edge cases better than me, and converts additional items beyond local users.