Comment 1 for bug 19641

I see this too, although unfortunately I don't have time to fix it. The problem
seems to be that (a) the module now appears in the initramfs, so eth0 is brought
up then, but the initramfs doesn't have hotplug (fair enough); (b) it used to be
possible to coldplug network interfaces later on, but there's no longer an
/etc/hotplug/net.rc so this doesn't happen, and the net event for eth0 is never
received outside the initramfs. Normally net.ifup would run when the hotplug
event is first received and then wait until the hotplug-net init script is run,
but this doesn't work in an initramfs situation.

There's discussion of this in Debian bugs #296640 and #303671, at least. Jeff,
could you please look at this fairly urgently? It breaks network-enabled
installations, because base-config expects to be able to download language packs
from the network and then suddenly finds that it can't.