Bug#837060: debootstrap: Do not install packages of Priority:required for buildd variant

[Sven Joachim <svenjoac@gmx.de>]

On 2016-09-08 22:12 +0200, Johannes Schauer wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On Thu, 08 Sep 2016 19:40:15 +0200 Sven Joachim <svenjoac@gmx.de> wrote:
>> Looking at the code in scripts/sid, it is "x_core_install mawk" which
>> fails here.  The reason is that mawk has not been downloaded,
>> debootstrap's limited dependency resolver cannot resolve base-files'
>> pre-dependency on awk.
>>
>> The good news is that with "--include=mawk" added to the commandline,
>> debootstrap succeeds and does not include tzdata or lsb-base in the
>> chroot. :-)
>>
>> So changing base-files to Pre-depend on mawk | awk seems to be the only
>> blocker here.  Would you like to file a blocking bug on base-files?
>
> I don't see why this is a bug in base-files. As far as I can see, base-files
> properly declares its pre-dependency on the virtual package awk. That
> debootstrap is unable to understand basic Debian dependency constructs (we are
> not even talking multiarch here) is a bug in debootstrap.
>
> This is also the point where I wonder how much sense it makes to have yet
> another resolver of Debian's complex dependency mechanism around. It's one of
> the reasons why I often use multistrap instead of debootstrap because the
> former uses apt which already implements all the required dependency logic.

Unlike multistrap, debootstrap also needs to work on systems where
apt or dpkg are not available.

> If debootstrap wants to depend on its own resolver, then it has to make sure
> that it is up to the task of dealing with Debian's dependency system.

I think that cdebootstrap is better in that respect, because it runs
apt-get at the end of the installation to fix up any broken
dependencies.  Somebody™ ought to implement this in debootstrap.

Cheers,
       Sven