[buildd-tools-devel] Bug#836940: cowbuilder, sbuild: should behave identically in regard to default gnupg installation

[Markus Koschany]

Package: cowbuilder, sbuild
Severity: normal

Hello cowbuilder and sbuild maintainers,

I am assigning this bug report to both of you in order to determine the
best course of action. Please feel free to reassign and change the
severity as appropriate.

The package xmlgraphics-commons started recently failing to build from
source in a clean sbuild environment although it was built successfully
on the buildd network a few months ago. This behavior cannot be observed
in a clean cowbuilder environment though. [1]

The reasoning for the FTBFS is a missing dependency on gnupg which was
always present in default cowbuilder and sbuild environments until
recently. According to [2] this behavioral change was introduced by the
apt maintainers, more accurately in version 1.3~exp1 of apt.

* move gnupg|gnupg2 from apt Depends to Recommends

This is causing build failures in sbuild now, not only for
xmlgraphics-commons but for all packages that relied on gnupg being
installed by default.

Please clarify if

1. This change should be reverted in apt to restore the old behavior
2. or if sbuild should install gnupg by default
3. or if cowbuilder should not install gnupg by default

I think it is important that all maintainers can rely on the same
default chroot environment to test their packages before uploading to
avoid possible build failures.

Thanks for maintaining these important tools and keep up the good work.

Regards,

Markus


[1] https://bugs.debian.org/834744
[2] https://bugs.debian.org/834898#39

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