Bug#820946: guess basepath based on --dist and --arch

[Antoine Beaupré]

Package: cowbuilder
Version: 0.73
Severity: wishlist

I am often using cowbuilder with fairly consistent chroot locations. I
have done my best to document this setup with git-buildpackage here:

https://wiki.debian.org/cowbuilder#Using_with_git-buildpackage

I am using the pbuilderrc from Ubuntu documented here:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PbuilderHowto

This is all very messy. It seems to me cowbuilder itself would gain a
lot from being able to generate consistent --basepath defaults based
on the --dist and --arch arguments, not only at creation but also at
build time.

Tools like cowpoke go through convoluted steps to work around this
limitation right now:

http://sources.debian.net/src/devscripts/2.16.2/scripts/cowpoke.sh/#L341

... in a layout that is different from git-buildpackage's. The result
is that we have inconsistent locations for those chroots among
different tools, because there are no reasonable defaults in
cowbuilder.

Adding such a default would improve the consistency of this across
tools.

A.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 8.4
  APT prefers stable-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'proposed-updates'), (500, 'stable'), (1, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 4.2.0-0.bpo.1-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=fr_CA.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=fr_CA.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages cowbuilder depends on:
ii  cowdancer  0.73
ii  libc6      2.19-18+deb8u4
ii  pbuilder   0.215+nmu3

cowbuilder recommends no packages.

cowbuilder suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information