Bug#842786: marked as pending

[Jeremy Bicha]

On 10 January 2017 at 04:52, Santiago Vila <sanvila at unex.es> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 10, 2017 at 04:20:10AM -0500, Jeremy Bicha wrote:
>> On 10 January 2017 at 03:53, Santiago Vila <sanvila at unex.es> wrote:
>> > Hi. Could you please write better changelog entries?
>> >
>> > Whoever reads that will think that the bug was about a new upstream
>> > being uploaded, but that's definitely not the case.
>> >
>> > A better changelog would be for example like this:
>> >
>> >   * New upstream release.
>> >   * Should fix FTBFS when using overlayfs (Closes: #842786)
>>
>> Actually, it doesn't fix anything because it's not clear that there's
>> anything broken.
>
> To me it's quite clear what it's broken: It's the combination of a
> source tarball not having directory entries, plus a kernel which does
> not support overlayfs properly.
>
> We can fix the kernel, or we can fix the unorthodox tarball.
>
>> If the package weren't buildable, it should have
>> shown up as unbuildable in the Reproducible Builds project.
>
> No, this is not black or white. They are using pbuilder, I'm using
> sbuild. Packages buildable with pbuilder are not necessarily buildable
> with sbuild, and viceversa.
>
> In fact, they do "dpkg-buildpackage", and I do "dpkg-buildpackage -A"
> most of the time and sometimes "dpkg-buildpackage -B". Any of those is
> a bug when it fails, but reproducible builds will not catch them if
> they do just "dpkg-buildpackage".
>
> Also, they do not support shared memory, while I configured my sbuild
> to support shared memory. Some packages I can build, they can't,
> and you will see a strange error abour semaphores not working.
>
>> The
>> changelog entry isn't completely useless as rebuilding the package (or
>> uploading an updated package) proves that the package is buildable.
>
> Again, this is not black or white.
>
> And the changelog should not be used to close bugs if there is no
> source changes associated with the closing.
>
>> Would it be more appropriate for me to just close this bug as invalid
>> instead of doing it via changelog?
>
> If it was an invalid bug, yes, not only it would be more appropriate,
> it would be certainly wrong to close it in the changelog.
> (Just read the usual recommendations to write changelog entries).
>
> But this was not really the case. It was a perfectly valid bug.
>
> Why don't you just try to reproduce it? You just have to use sbuild
> with overlayfs.
>
> Please try it, if you can't reproduce it I will try to help as much as
> I can.
>
> Thanks.

I did try. As I reported on November 1, my build machine is Ubuntu,
now updated to 17.04, using sbuild with union-type=overlay.

I copied the get-orig-source rule from other Debian packges (see
debian/rules for citations). If you think there's something here that
could be done better, please submit a patch (and probably submit it to
the other Debian packages too).

Thanks,
Jeremy