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Re: Bits from the FTPMaster meeting



On Sat, 28 Nov 2009 22:25:31 +0100
Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org> wrote:

> On Tue, 2009-11-24 at 10:25:59 +0000, Neil Williams wrote:
> > On Sat, 21 Nov 2009 03:01:06 +0100
> > Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org> wrote:
> > > Well, IMO any program implementing .deb extraction w/o using something
> > > like --fsys-tarfile, --extract or --control from dpkg-deb (until we
> > > have the upcoming libdpkg...), should be prepared to handle the format
> > > described in deb(5), and deserves a bug otherwise. The fact that the
> > > Debian archive only accepts a subset of the valid .deb format, or that
> > > we might not want to have bzip2 compressed packages in the base system
> > > is a matter of policy in Debian, and does not mean others might want to
> > > do otherwise.
> > 
> > Fixed in multistrap 2.0.4, just arriving in sid.
> 
> Checking the svn repo I still see at least one problematic piece of
> code. In “emrootfslib (unpack_debootstrap)”

I did say that multistrap was fixed - emrootfslib is part of emsandbox
which is meant to serve Emdebian Crush, not multistrap. Currently, all
development on Emdebian Crush is stalled - including the root
filesystem installation methods. The current code is there to support
Lenny and has no support for Squeeze or Sid because the only packages
available for Crush are for ARM, not armel or any other Debian
architecture. There is no ARM support in Squeeze, therefore changes made
in any package after the release of Lenny have no effect on any part of
the Emdebian Crush packages or support system, including emrootfslib.
Crush development will only restart when we have a new build system
based on multiarch that can cope with more than one architecture.

http://lists.debian.org/debian-embedded/2009/08/msg00005.html

It's the old "single-developer-now-unavailable" problem.

As I said, the issue is fixed in multistrap - which is the only place
in that SVN repo where the fix actually matters. It is not currently
possible to use emrootfslib with any package more recent than the
version released in Lenny - no other packages exist for it to use and
new packages cannot be built for it to use.

Once Crush development does restart, the systems used to generate and
install root filesystems may well migrate to multistrap anyway -
basing the multistrap on the modified packages in the Emdebian Crush
repository.

emrootfslib is a specialised component of a specialised tool for a
specialised set of packages with a specialised purpose. General changes
in dpkg have negligible impact on it.

multistrap, however, is a much more general purpose script intended to
work with Emdebian Grip. As Grip is binary-compatible with standard
Debian, multistrap works with standard Debian too - hence the fix
uploaded to Sid.

Crush 1.0 was a learning curve, a proof of concept, with only a few
hundred packages on a single architecture. Lots of parts of the build
system for Crush 1.0 will not survive into Crush 3.0; as the systems
mature, the need for such specialised tools becomes less relevant. Only
then can Crush be usable enough to support more packages and more
architectures.

A lot of that testing and development is going on now within Emdebian
Grip. Once multiarch allows us to solve the fundamental breakage in the
build system used for Crush 1.0, we can start to look to the future.

> > I'll update deb-gview for its next release, although I'll need some
> > real packages using data.tar.bz2 before I can test it.
> 
> You could repack an existing .deb using dpkg-deb and the -Z option.

deb-gview doesn't repack anything. It inspects the contents of the .deb
directly using libarchive. deb-gview does not use dpkg.

-- 


Neil Williams
=============
http://www.data-freedom.org/
http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/
http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/

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