Bug#880802: No documented way to pass a command into cowbuilder execute

[Russ Allbery]

Thorsten Glaser <tg at mirbsd.de> writes:
> Mattia Rizzolo dixit:
>> On Sat, Nov 04, 2017 at 01:45:59PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:

>> executable (be it binary or script), copy it inside the chroot, and
>> execute it.

Where do you pass the name of the executable, though?  I never got an
error message that seemed to indicate I had successfully done such a
thing.  Either cowbuilder reported that I didn't pass in a valid argument
for --execute or it produced an error saying that the argument I did pass
in was an invalid argument.

> So Russ probably wants this:

> echo apt update | cowbuilder \
>     --basepath /var/cache/pbuilder/base-experimental.cow \
>     --login --save-after-login

Oh, I had forgotten about --save-after-login.  Thank you!

> In this specific case, though:

> cowbuilder --basepath /var/cache/pbuilder/base-experimental.cow --update

I was debugging why the chroot failed to update with an obscure apt error
and was trying to incrementally update some of the packages, which is why
I was going down the path of trying to run commands with preserved results
instead of just using --update.

Thanks!  --save-after-login was the real solution to my problem, but I
suspect that --execute doesn't really work with the cowbuilder wrapper (or
I missed some iteration of call sequence to try).

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>