I'm considering dropping emsandbox in favour of multistrap. Problems: 1. emsandbox relies on debootstrap but is not used in the way that debootstrap is designed to be used (inside an installer). Instead it is used in environments where apt and dpkg are known to already be working (apt is a dependency of emdebian-rootfs). There seems to be little reason to continue using debootstrap instead of multistrap which is far simpler to maintain and far more flexible in use. 2. emsandbox machine:variant support can be reimplemented (arguably more flexibly) with multistrap. 3. the debootstrap underpinnings of emsandbox are simply bust. The old method of adding packages to a static file in /usr/share/ is a poor model and multistrap provides a much better method of having userspace config files where only the extra packages are listed explicitly and apt is used to get the missing dependencies. The /usr/share/emdebian-tools/emdebian.gpe suite scripts need to be fixed or replaced. Multistrap is immune to those problems. Solution: 1. Drop emdebian-rootfs as a source and binary package name , rename as multistrap and massively simplify the dependencies. (em_multistrap would disappear, just a single binary called /usr/sbin/multistrap because the code is just as capable of native and cross usage without further changes.) 2. Migrate some files into emdebian-tools - the state of the toolchains makes it hard to see how to fix the empdebuild script that uses the other half of emdebian-rootfs (which supported empdebuild). AFAICT it isn't possible for empdebuild --create to complete without manual intervention. 3. Start to strip out scripts like 'emsetup' and 'emchain' which are also fairly broken. These scripts won't survive the removal of apt-cross and, again, AFAICT don't actually complete at the moment anyway. This takes the guts out of the emdebian-tools top-level package, putting the emphasis on emdebian-buildsupport. In effect, emdebian-buildsupport would become the principal package and emdebian-tools would contain some minor extras. If it's deemed worthwhile, I could rename both packages, emdebian-tools could become a virtual package with a new emdebian-extras package or we could drop scripts like embug or those could move into emdebian-qa. There are other parts of emdebian-tools and emdebian-buildsupport that need to be removed too - emdebhelper.mk and em_make are no longer useful compared to doing the tasks later via emgrip. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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