[buildd-tools-devel] schroot development: feature removal and addition

[Roger Leigh]

Hi folks,

Would any buildd admins be able to summarise which chroot types are in 
active use on current buildds?

The reason behind this is that I'm considering removal of some of the 
older chroot types which are no longer actively used, and which have 
better replacements.  In particular, I'm thinking of LVM snapshot 
support which while functional has been plagued by udev locking bugs 
over the years, and which is inflexible with regard to requiring 
pre-allocated space on the source and snapshot volume which can result 
in severe problems when miscalculated and the block device stops working.

Are the existing tar and btrfs-snapshot types adequate replacements for 
most cases?  I'm planning on adding zfs-snapshot as well which may be 
useful on the kFreeBSD side as well as for Linux.  Are there any uses 
for which there isn't a good replacement and which LVM serves the best?

I think union filesystems have usage from bug reports, but no idea how 
popular they are in practice.  Likewise for loopback mounts--I suspect 
this is fairly uncommon, but it's harmless to keep around.

With regard to feature addition, I'll look at (re-)starting doing a bit 
of work on the 1.7.x (master) branch.  Are there any particularly 
important features you would like to see adding, or any particularly 
glaring defects?  I know there are some important issues from the Debian 
and Ubuntu bugs, but I lack the background to meaningfully test and 
review any patches--if anyone would like to open PRs for these with 
tested patches, I'll be happy to apply them.   (I am in the process of 
setting up some VMs specifically for properly testing schroot, but 
please bear with me until they are sorted out.)

If anyone wishes to do any schroot work and push any desired changes, 
please open a pull request at https://github.com/codelibre-net/schroot

I saw Raphael had done some reorganisation of the Debian schroot.git; 
thanks for doing that.  If there's anything you need or want from me, 
please shout.  Do you want the debian/ directory removing from the 
upstream master and/or schroot-1.6 branches to make your work easier?  I 
was planning to do so at some point, but I'll do whatever you prefer here.


Regards,
Roger