Bug#862362: autopkgtest-virt-qemu: /dev/baseimage still causes problems for /dev/disk/by-*

[Simon McVittie]

Package: autopkgtest
Version: 4.4
Severity: normal
Tags: patch

The changes made for #842299 do not seem to be entirely reliable: I still
sometimes get /dev/disk/by-partlabel/* pointing to /dev/vdb* (the read-only
copy of the base image) rather than the expected /dev/vda* (the read/write
overlay). This is problematic for an embedded Debian derivative that I'm
working on, which uses those symlinks.

I wonder whether this might be a result of not explicitly waiting for the
shell prompt to be issued after previous commands on ttyS1, such that when
we wait for a shell prompt to synchronize after doing udev things, we are
actually seeing the shell prompt from some previous command. I haven't had
a chance to try/debug that yet though.

Since the base image is rarely used and clearly rather subtle, I think a
pragmatic approach to this might be to make it optional, as with the
attached patch.

Regards,
    S

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 9.0
  APT prefers testing-proposed-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'testing-proposed-updates'), (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable'), (100, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64
 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 4.9.0-2-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages autopkgtest depends on:
ii  apt-utils       1.4.2
ii  libdpkg-perl    1.18.23
ii  procps          2:3.3.12-3
ii  python3         3.5.3-1
ii  python3-debian  0.1.30

Versions of packages autopkgtest recommends:
ii  autodep8  0.8

Versions of packages autopkgtest suggests:
pn  lxc          <none>
pn  lxd-client   <none>
ii  qemu-system  1:2.8+dfsg-4+b2
ii  qemu-utils   1:2.8+dfsg-4+b2
ii  schroot      1.6.10-3+b1

-- no debconf information
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