Re: Removal of apt-cross from Squeeze is imminent

[Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de>]

Neil Williams <codehelp@debian.org> writes:

> On Wed, 20 Oct 2010 14:50:21 +0200
> Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de> wrote:
>
>> 
>> Please note that due to your insistence on the simplicity (and
>> buggyness) of xapt it is in no way a replacement for apt-cross. It does
>> not work for anything but pbuilder.
>> 
>> If you want it to replace apt-cross then some fixing has to be done.
>
> xapt doesn't care about the status of already installed packages (at
> least, not permanently), so it redoes the work it did last time but that
> is not a bug which can be fixed as it is precisely this kind of
> calculation that lead to all the bugs in apt-cross (resulting from the
> renaming of packages when making them cross-build compatible). This is
> likely to make things awkward when cross-building on a fast moving
> platform like Debian unstable but then apt-cross could never reliably
> cope with unstable either and xapt will at least cope with whatever mix
> of suites users want to select whereas apt-cross was completely bust if
> more than one suite was in the apt-cache policy.

Which is anoying if you do multiple builds as it always will install the
core packages again and again and again even if you already have them in
the base.tgz.

But that is mostly just anoying, not something that will break. It would
also be fairly simple to fix by preserving a status file across runs.
Since xapt has no dependencies between normal and -cross packages (no
renaming) the entanglement and upgrade problems of apt-cross do not
apply here.

> apt-cross is going away - there is nothing now that can prevent this -
> and xapt is the only candidate for that functionality. xapt was
> designed not to be a drop-in replacement for apt-cross but it can do
> the core functionality that people needed from apt-cross without the
> extra stuff which caused all the old bugs.
>
> It is not a question of replacing apt-cross. It is a question of coping
> with the imminent removal of apt-cross by providing something that at
> least does the simple bits.

Except it does not do the trick outside of a pbuilder chroot. At least
not when you have a non trivial apt config (e.g. when having other apt
utils installed). Or when you have Apt::Architectures set.

The fix for this is quite simple as I pointed out before. You need to
create an xapt.conf use APT_CONFIG=xapt.conf in the environment to avoid
reading in the default apt config.

MfG
        Goswin

PS: I could provide patches for both issues. That would add maybe 10
lines.