Bug#833407: Please put adt-virt-* binaries back onto PATH

[Ian Jackson]

Johannes Schauer writes ("Re: Please put adt-virt-* binaries back onto PATH"):
> thanks a lot Ian for making these four points. I could not've put it
> better. I was very happy with the original autopkgtest design as it
> finally gave us a way to abstract container access in a more or less
> unified way and allowed to avoid every tool to re-implement its own
> set of container support.

Right.  That was precisely what I was trying to put an end to.

> I was even thinking of making the
> autopkgtest backend the default (and integrate it such that it would
> be easier to use from the sbuild command line) and drop the custom
> schroot backend in favor of the adt schroot backend and thus
> decrease overall code complexity.

The former would certainly be nice.  I can see why as the maintainer
you would like the latter.

> In fact I only noticed this breakage because I wanted to add support for
> adt-run-* to another tool: piuparts which already comes with lots of code
> supporting the adt-run-* utilities. Now its broken.

I think in the rest of this mail you have mistakenly started writing
adt-run-* instead of adt-virt-* ?

Upstream autopkgtest seems to be deprecating adt-run in favour of a
new command line utility autopkgtest.  But those are both the DEP-8
test runners, which not so many other people are using, and for which
a transition plan with retention of adt-run for compatibility is
promised.

> Another program which is now broken is the reprotest tool which is
> developed in this year's GSoC project for the reproducible builds
> team.
> 
> Other tools that made use of adt-run-* and now have reduced functionality are
> pbuilder, jenkins-debian-glue, reprotest, pkg-perl-tools and debci.
> 
> Using codesearch.debian.net it is not hard to find that others
> depend on specific functionality of your software. Next time you
> remove features, please consult the consumers of these features
> first.

I prefer to attribute this to misunderstanding rather than
carelessness.

I don't think it had been appreciated that the adt-virt-* interface
was intended as, and had been treated as, a public interface, for use
by many other projects.

Ian.

-- 
Ian Jackson <ijackson at chiark.greenend.org.uk>   These opinions are my own.

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