[Pkg-xen-devel] Bug#1036601: xenstore-utils: broken symlink /usr/bin/xenstore-control

[Maximilian Engelhardt]

Control: retitle -1 xenstore-utils: broken symlink /usr/bin/xenstore-control

This is a bit more complicated:

Up to bullseye the binaries in the xenstore-utils package were independent of 
the running xen version (as the xenstore interface is more or less supposed to 
be stable).

Starting with bookworm the xenstore-control binary is now linked against 
unstable xen api libraries (libxenguest.so and libxenctrl.so) which are 
included in the libxenmisc4.17 package.
The upstream commit for this change is [1] and the documentation also says 
that the control command interface is not xen version independent.

Because of the additional shared library dependencies our shuffle-binaries 
script [3] kicks in and sets up the xen-utils-wrapper for xenstore-control.

The xen-utils-wrapper is only included in the xen-utils-common package. But 
adding that dependency would not be enough. It would make the /usr/bin/
xenstore-control symlink not broken, but the wrapper would not find the real 
binary, as it is included in the xen-utils-4.17 package at the /usr/lib/
xen-4.17/bin/xenstore-control path.

Installing only xenstore-utils and xen-utils-common in a dom-U gives the 
following output when executing xenstore-control:
$ xenstore-control 
ERROR:  Can't find version 4.17 of xen utils (maybe xen-utils-4.17 was already removed before rebooting out of Xen 4.17), bailing out!


Some options I see for fixing this:

[a] make xenstore-utils depend on xen-utils-V
[b] move the /usr/bin/xenstore-control symlink to xen-utils-V
[c] split the xenstore-utils package in a xen version independent and xen 
version dependent package.

Disadvantage from [a] is that xenstore-utils can also be used inside a dom-U 
and would pull lots of unused stuff. [c] seems to be a bit overkill for only 
one binary file, so I currently see [b] as the best option.

So does anybody have any opinion, ideas or something else to say about all 
this? Or any better ideas?


[1] https://salsa.debian.org/xen-team/debian-xen/-/commit/7f97193e6aa858df03be501440e0ade8cceb9ec5
[2] https://salsa.debian.org/xen-team/debian-xen/-/blob/master/docs/misc/xenstore.txt#L378
[3] https://salsa.debian.org/xen-team/debian-xen/-/blob/master/debian/shuffle-binaries
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