[Piuparts-devel] Bug#539142: piuparts should start with chroot with only required packages

[Petter Reinholdtsen]

severity 539142 important
thanks

Here is more information about this issue, which make piuparts report
failures when there are problems removing packages with priority
important.

Discovered this issue while looking at the current testing of sid.
The problem was triggered by util-linux depending on install-info,
which made the debfoster call to remove non-required packages done by
piuparts fail.

The issue seem to be that the sid chroot used by piuparts contain
packages with priority important or higher, while the test scripts
used by piuparts try to remove all packages with lower than required
priority.

This make piuparts try to remove packages that were part of the
chroot, and when this fail a lot of packages are reported to be buggy.

During testing, the following command is executed by piuparts:

  debfoster -o MaxPriority=required -o UseRecommends=no -f -n apt debfoster

When doing this on a clean chroot created using 'debootstrap sid
chroot-directory', the following packages are to be removed:

  adduser apt-utils aptitude bsdmainutils cpio cron dhcp3-client
  dhcp3-common dmidecode ed gcc-4.2-base gcc-4.3-base groff-base
  ifupdown info install-info iproute iptables iputils-ping libcwidget3
  libdevmapper1.02.1 libept0 libncursesw5 libnewt0.52 libpopt0
  libreadline6 libsigc++-2.0-0c2a libvolume-id1 libwrap0 libxapian15
  logrotate man-db manpages module-init-tools nano net-tools netbase
  netcat-traditional procps rsyslog tasksel tasksel-data traceroute
  udev vim-common vim-tiny wget whiptail

To create a chroot with only required packages, it is better to use

  debootstrap --variant=minbase sid chroot-directory

when creating the piuparts chroot.

As installing packages in the chroot that are later removed by
debfoster is creating problems during testing of packages, I raise the
severity of this issue to important.

Happy hacking,
-- 
Petter Reinholdtsen