Bug#983421: init-system-helpers: please respect DPKG_ROOT when checking for /usr/sbin/policy-rc.d

[Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues]

Hi all,

Quoting Felipe Sateler (2021-11-11 15:14:06)
> Sorry for the delay.

thank you for your reply. :)

> I have not been able to look much into this either. I looked at the patch,
> and it looks somewhat ok, even if a bit extensive.

if desired, I can greatly reduce the size of the patch by removing the
assertdpkgroot() and assertnotdpkgroot() functions. I used those to make sure
that the paths as they are passed around in deb-systemd-helper are having
DPKG_ROOT prepended only if desired and if yes, only once. Since our tests did
not trigger any errors and produces bit-by-bit identical results, I assume that
it works correctly and theoretically the two assert functions could be removed,
thus reducing the size of the patch significantly.

> From my own POV, I think the main issue is precisely that we have no way of
> knowing if this patch would break things or not. Given the centrality of this
> package, it makes for a slow patch inclusion process. Additionally, I'm not
> very proficient in perl, which is the primary language here.

For normal installations, the value of $DPKG_ROOT is the empty string. I think
it's easy to see that in the normal case, the behaviour of the script would not
change.

> What could be very helpful is to actually have some CI that would give me
> (some) certainty a given patch does not break anything. Would it be possible
> to move (some) of that CI you mention into this repo?

Yes, certainly. What kind of tests would you like? Right now, there are still
six source packages that need patching so that the DPKG_ROOT approach works for
the essential package set. Would you like me to add an autopkgtest that does
the same thing our CI does, i.e. patches packages, compiles them and then
builds a unstable chroot and makes sure that the chroot tarball is bit-by-bit
identical to one produced without DPKG_ROOT?

Or do you want tests for the normal case without DPKG_ROOT? Isn't piuparts
doing installation testing already? What kind of tests would you like me to
write for you?

Thanks!

cheers, josch
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