[pkg-lxc-devel] Deprecation of lxc-templates in favor of distrobuilder

[Mathias Gibbens]

  lxc-templates has been deprecated upstream since the lxc 3.0
release[1,2] in favor of distrobuilder. distrobuilder is now available
in testing and sid, and should be part of the upcoming trixie release.

  While there are no plans to remove lxc-templates from the archive, I
would like to start socializing the use of distrobuilder instead. This
is because lxc-templates is unsupported by upstream and all current
work on container/VM images is being done in distrobuilder. At the
moment lxc-templates continue to work, there is no guarantee for how
long this will be true. Small tweaks or adjustments here and there
might keep it alive for another Debian release or two, but it's
essentially dead.

  Within the next week or so lxc 6.0 is expected to be released. As
part of the packaging updates, it is planned to move lxc-templates from
bin:lxc's Recommends to Suggests, and add distrobuilder to Recommends.

  As we are still early in the trixie development cycle, I hope there
will be plenty of time to resolve any issues that might be found when
switching to distrobuilder.

  lxc-templates does have one advantage over distrobuilder -- it is
available for all of Debian's non-Hurd architectures, while
distrobuilder is only available on release architectures plus loong64.
I don't know if this will actually impact anyone (x32 maybe?) but it is
something to be aware of.

Mathias

[1] -- https://discuss.linuxcontainers.org/t/lxc-3-0-0-has-been-released/1449
[2] -- https://brauner.io/2018/02/27/lxc-removes-legacy-template-build-system.html
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