Bug#557296: debootstrap: Use dpkg-deb instead of ar when available
Hi!
On Sat, 2009-11-21 at 18:48:51 -0200, Otavio Salvador wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 21, 2009 at 6:34 PM, Frans Pop <elendil@planet.nl> wrote:
> > On Saturday 21 November 2009, Otavio Salvador wrote:
> >> In my opinion debootstrap shouldn't work differently inside of Debian
> >> so I think we shouldn't use dpkg-deb for this. Even though it would
> >> make our life easier giving us "new features" for free it also makes
> >> much more difficult to spot possible missing features when using it in
> >> foreign distributions and I believe this is something we ought to
> >> support well.
Yes, that's why I explicitly pointed that out in the bug report. And I
can understand the reservations.
But then debootstrap has not supported all valid .debs for some time
now, so if ar would be only used outside Debian, it would have been
on the same situation as currently (prior to the extra compression
patch being applied).
And debootstrap already works differently depending on the environment,
say when retrieving the architecture using udpkg, dpkg or a text file.
Or in the pkgdetails case. Just two examples I've seen. Which is not
justification enough to introduce more divergence, of course!
> > That was my initial reaction as well. One thing that could count against
> > that is that in Debian Installer dpkg-deb is not available either, which
> > would probably ensure sufficient testing of that path.
Right. Additionally an option could be added to explicitly choose the
extractor, to ease testing.
> > I should IMO be agreed that debootstrap should never rely on features not
> > commonly available using basic *nix tools.
Sure, and one of the features of the deb format is that it can be
handled that way if desired. But that it can be handled that way does
not mean we should not use the best tool for the job if available, and
falling back to the basic Unix tools variant otherwise.
> Supporting dpkg-deb in this case will only add code complexity
> maintainence issues.
Well, the refactoring patch IMO can be applied regardless of this bug
being rejected.
And I could understand this complaint if we'd be talking about
thousands of lines of code, but the code using dpkg-deb instead of ar
is pretty small (29 lines changed in the functions file including the
chooser logic), with the dpkg-deb variant being the simpler one. :)
> I can foresee we asking: This debootstrap failure were with it running
> inside of Debian or d-i?
The extractor choosed could be output to avoid that kind of situation.
I can amend the patch adding that if desired.
thanks,
guillem
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