[Piuparts-devel] Missing depends on lsb-base, need your help

[Santiago Vila]

On Thu, Oct 06, 2016 at 01:09:12PM +0200, Andreas Beckmann wrote:
> On 2016-10-05 12:00, Santiago Vila wrote:
> > So: would be possible for you to remove lsb-base from your "base" chroot
> > in your piuparts laboratory? If this is checked automatically in your setup,
> > we will discover all the bugs like the one above a lot faster.
> 
> The chroots are created with a command like
> 
> ['debootstrap', '--variant=minbase',
> '--keyring=/usr/share/keyrings/debian-archive-keyring.gpg',
> '--components=main', '--arch=amd64', 'sid', '/tmp/piupartss/tmpv4a4v7',
> 'http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian']
> 
> so debootstrap (still) pulls this in by default (just recreated my sid
> chroot). I didn't dig deeper, though ...
> 
> I'd prefer debootstrap creating such a minimal chroot by default over
> "cleaning the chroot" in piuparts.

I would also prefer debootstrap creating minimal chroots by default,
but that's not what's happening at this moment, hence my suggestion
to clean the chroot as the second best option.

I guess this could be done easily with some additional command line
arguments, not necessarily after creating the chroot.

Some examples of why I think this would be a very good thing:

While checking for "dpkg-buildpackage -A", I removed gnupg, which is
not essential, from my chroot. Thanks to that, I discovered a bunch of
packages having a missing build-depends on gnupg. Most of the reports
are already fixed.

Similarly, Lucas Nussbaum removed tzdata, which is not essential, from
his chroots, and thanks to that he discovered a lot of packages with
missing build-depends on tzdata.

This case is very similar: regardless of the severity of the bugs,
and regardless of what debootstrap does by default at this moment,
the sooner we report such bugs, the sooner we will have them fixed.

In other words, I don't see a good reason to wait for debootstrap to
create smaller chroots by default, as there is nothing really
"canonical" or "standard" in those default chroots, except the fact
that they are just the default. The only really canonical thing is the
set of packages actually being essential:yes at a given time.

(Sorry for the long email, I have not had time to make it shorter).

Thanks.