Bug#770412: grub-xen: fails to install in a chroot

[Colin Watson]

On Fri, Nov 21, 2014 at 12:42:43PM +0000, Ian Campbell wrote:
> Looking at https://piuparts.debian.org/jessie/source/g/grub2.html it
> seems the test passed for other grub-* packages, e.g. grub-pc and
> grub-efi, in the previous release. I'm a bit confused by this since at
> least on first glance most of the related code seems to be the same in
> grub-xen as in those others.

I think the difference here is likely that at least some of the other
platforms only run grub-install after it's been run once already, and as
you say we probably just don't run piuparts on the more exotic
architectures.  Not clear that that approach makes sense for Xen though.

> Is it expected that the chroot in a piuparts test won't have a /dev
> mounted? What about /sys and /proc?

We can't necessarily guarantee that /dev is comprehensible by
grub-install in things like loopback setups.  But we do at least need to
figure out the file system in use for /boot/grub/ in order to produce a
useful core image, so we probably can't just stub out this check.

I'm not sure that ischroot or running-in-container is suitable.  It
seems to me that you want to be able to prepare an image in a chroot or
a container which will be bootable by Xen.  It's not ideal, but perhaps
just sticking in "|| true" is semi-reasonable in this case to pacify
piuparts.  It would be worth checking whether the current code works in
image-build-like scenarios such as live-build.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at debian.org]