[buildd-tools-devel] sbuild just hangs

[Johannes Schauer]

Hi,

Quoting Roger Leigh (2015-07-30 17:13:23)
> > That was it! Thanks! In my case the problem was that "unstable" (as I
> > specified in the changelog) would not work either, because my chroot is
> > called "sid". So sbuild -d sid worked just fine.
> 
> Note that you probably want
> 
>    -d unstable --chroot=sid
> 
> (IIRC) since the distribution is also used when doing stuff that needs 
> the correct distribution name, e.g. making NMUs which needs a valid 
> changelog entry.  The --chroot option selects a different chroot without 
> altering the distribution in use.

since I've also been bitten by this and related issues myself, I'd like to fix
this and other issues which I think are in a similar area. But before I can
cook up the right patch, I'd like to discuss with you what it actually is that
sbuild is supposed to do or should be expected to do. I think many of the
problems come from sbuild being used on autobuilders mostly but has only
"recently" gained support to be run by users on unpacked sources.

Firstly, about bug #790547: currently, sbuilds behaviour when it cannot find
the distribution given in debian/changelog is undesirable. I wonder how to
correctly handle this. One way would be to just print an appropriate error
message and exit. Another way would be to fall back to sid/unstable
automatically. Which option would you find more appropriate?

Secondly, whenever I saw somebody use the -d argument, they would just use it
as a way to select the chroot to build in. But in addition to that it will also
override the value set in debian/changelog, thus possibly leading to wrong
uploads as the argument to -d is put in the resulting .changes file. The sbuild
man page doesn't even mention this effect of the -d option which is probably
why it's used so much. The help text in the configuration file explains better
what $distribution does but the sbuild wiki even goes so far to suggest putting
$distribution='sid' in the configuration file which means that unless the user
is really aware of the implications of -d, they will always create .changes
file with sid as the distribution no matter what they put in debian/changelog.
Is this "feature" of putting a different value in the resulting .changes file
than the maintainer put in their debian/changelog useful for anything?

I'd like to put much more warnings about the usage of the -d option up in the
man page, in the help text in sbuildrc and in the wiki.

But if there is no real world use for putting a different distribution value in
the generated .changes file than in the input debian/changelog, then how about
deprecating this functionality?

Thirdly, I think that the default sbuild configuration should do the right
thing when building Debian packages. This means, that even if the target
release in debian/changelog is UNRELEASED, then sbuild should default to build
for "sid" (or another default value settable in the sbuildrc). If the
distribution in debian/changelog is sid, then sbuild should also consider the
chroot called "unstable" and the other way round.

Fourthly, the -c option choose the chroot to use. But I think one of the
reasons why people rather use -d to choose the chroot is because it's so much
shorter to write -d sid compared to writing -c sid-amd64-sbuild. There should
be an equally short option to select the chroot but *without* overwriting the
distribution value in the resulting .changes file.

> Note that you can add "aliases=unstable-amd64-sbuild" or equivalent for 
> your distribution/arch to your schroot configuration, which will make it 
> select the appropriate distribution when you use "-d unstable".

Fifthly, I think this should be the default behaviour for the sid/unstable
pair.  I'm just unsure whether schroot should set this default or whether
sbuild should translate sid to unstable and the other way round?

What do you think?

cheers, josch
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