[buildd-tools-devel] Bug#865541: Bug#865541: sbuild --apt-distupgrade should not remove build-essential

[Raphael Hertzog]

Hi,

On Fri, 23 Jun 2017, Johannes Schauer wrote:
> > Or another solution is possibly to first upgrade build-essential, put it on
> > hold and then run dist-upgrade.
> 
> either the subject is not well picked or I'm still misunderstanding the issue
> here. As I understand it, the problem is not that sbuild removes
> build-essential. I understand that what you would like sbuild to be able to do
> is to ignore certain dependency relationships between packages. Is my
> understanding correct?

No, I just want the integrated "dist-upgrade" feature to not break the
build chroot. My definition of "breaking the build chroot" includes
"removing build-essential".

It happens that the repository that I was using had a broken libc6-dev
(until I updated linux-libc-dev to a newer version) but since libc6-dev
was already installed in the build chroot, sbuild should be able to build
the package anyway and just be happy to keep libc6 on hold instead of
force-upgrading it by removing build-essential.

> In the mean time, why don't you run sbuild without running "apt-get
> dist-upgrade"? You can do that by adding --no-apt-distupgrade to your sbuild
> invocation or by adding
> 
> $apt_distupgrade = 0;
> 
> to your ~/.sbuildrc.

This works only if you are able to anticipate the problem. Once libc6-dev
has been removed from the build chroot, you can't reinstall it as the version
available in the repository is broken. So you are stuck and must somehow
manually downgrade to another working version.

Note also that we are speaking of build daemons where our usual
interaction is just to upload a package... temporarily modifying the
sbuild configuration of the build daemon is painful.

> Could you expand on your issue so that I can understand what exactly it is that
> sbuild is either doing wrong or what you would like sbuild to be able to do?

I would "sbuild-update -d" to ensure that it doesn't remove
build-essential (assuming that's what sbuild calls when we use
--apt-distupgrade).

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer

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