[buildd-tools-devel] [GIT] sbuild branch master updated. release/sbuild-0.68.0-10-ge2d63eb

[Johannes Schauer]

Hi Colin,

Quoting Colin Watson (2016-02-18 15:28:23)
> - Log -----------------------------------------------------------------
> commit e2d63ebc20c8d2ef5d96db83828087505928895f
> Author: Colin Watson <cjwatson at ubuntu.com>
> Date:   Thu Feb 18 14:22:15 2016 +0000
> 
>     Sbuild::ResolverBase: use copy: for dummy archive
>     
>     We used to use file: URIs for sbuild's dummy archive, but recent
>     versions of apt put symlinks in /var/lib/apt/lists/ if we do that, which
>     means that those symlinks become broken as soon as we remove the dummy
>     archive.  sbuild itself is OK with this, but launchpad-buildd tries to
>     read /var/lib/apt/lists/*_Packages in order to do dep-wait analysis
>     after failures, and that fails if there are broken symlinks there.  It's
>     easy enough to avoid this problem by using copy: URIs instead, so let's
>     do that.
> 
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------

I don't think this change is a good solution. Apt might start using symlinks
for the copy: URI as well in the future or do some other whacky thing with what
is in /var/lib/apt/lists. At that point, this workaround will break and has to
be fixed some other way.

So instead, why not fix your problem where the actual breakage comes from:
nobody but apt should access /var/lib/apt/lists as what is in there has never
been guaranteed to be stable. See #752702 for more explanation from the apt
maintainers.

So why implement a workaround in sbuild instead of fixing the source of the
problem: launchpad-buildd?

Either let it correctly handle broken symlinks or (much better) use `apt-get
indextargets` together with `/usr/lib/apt/apt-helper cat-file` to retrieve the
information you want from /var/lib/apt/lists.

What do you think?

cheers, josch
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