Please, minimize your build chroots
Greetings.
I'm doing archive-wide rebuilds again.
I've just filed 21 bugs with subject "Missing build-depends on tzdata"
in bookworm (as tzdata is not build-essential).
This is of course not fun for the maintainers, but it's also not fun
for people doing QA, because those bugs could be caught earlier in the
chain, but they are not. This is extra work for everybody.
(Similar bugs are even sliding into stable releases, I plan to report
a few of them against bullseye after 11.6 this Saturday, as bullseye
is the currently supported stable release).
Because people accept the default by debootrap "as is", chroots used
to build packages include packages which are neither essential nor
build-essential, like tzdata, mount or e2fsprogs.
I can think of two solutions for this:
A) Either debootstrap, when using buildd profile, installs only
essential and build-essential packages.
or
B) debootstrap keeps installing all required packages in the buildd profile,
no matter if they are really build-essential or not, but those who
are not build-essential should have their priority downgraded to "important"
by ftpmaster.
This problem was already reported here:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=837060
and apparently we have not decided yet if we are going to do A or B,
or maybe some other thing. I don't really care how it's fixed, but I
believe it's about time that we sync practice with policy, because
currently we are doing this in a quite suboptimal way.
In the meantime: If you want to help QA and have any kind of chroot used
for any kind of QA (say, ci.debian.org or reproducible-builds, or even
your personal chroots), please try to minimize the packages there,
do not merely accept debootstrap default behaviour.
Thanks.
Reply to: