Bug#910685: glibc: please support DPKG_ROOT
Hi Aurelien,
On Tue, Apr 14, 2020 at 05:49:38PM +0200, Helmut Grohne wrote:
> Yes, please. Is there anything blocking this? Without support in glibc,
> moving forward is a little difficult. Can you include it soonish?
I pinged Aurelien on IRC about this. Let me summarize your answer here:
* The relevant maintainer scripts are fragile. Experience has shown
that every time one touches them they break. They should be
well-tested.
* Does the patch actually make libc6 work the way it advertises?
* What about libc-bin?
* Why not move forward with more testing of more packages before
applying this patch?
Yes, that makes sense. Let me give a partial answer already.
I've performed a number of upgrades from unstable to patched libc
packages in buildd-like environments now. The coverage is limited.
I've set up a little testing lab to build patched versions of
base-files, bash, coreutils, debhelper, debianutils, dpkg, glibc, shadow
and util-linux. When installing subsets of essential using these patched
packages, few packages fail to install. The failures are base-files,
base-passwd, bash, dash, debconf, libc-bin, libpam-modules-bin,
libpam-modules, libpam0g, login, mawk, sysvinit-utils, and util-linux.
The majority of failures is due to missing patches for debconf. libc-bin
is notable here as it will need changes to ldconfig to support this use
case. However, very few packages depend on libc-bin. Therefore, I think
solving libc-bin at a later time is reasonable.
Small steps have been made in various packages:
https://salsa.debian.org/pkg-debconf/debconf/-/merge_requests/4
https://salsa.debian.org/debian/shadow/-/merge_requests/10
https://salsa.debian.org/debian/shadow/-/merge_requests/11
https://salsa.debian.org/debian/debianutils/-/merge_requests/5
Guillem Jover resumed up work on dpkg-maintscript-helper and
update-alternatives.
In any case, I think that this patch does indeed make the library (not
libc-bin) work for DPKG_ROOT and I'd prefer libc-bin to be handled in a
separate issue.
So yeah, we can move forward without this being merged if we really
want. Questioning whether this patch blocks progress was a useful thing
to do. There will be more fixes.
Helmut
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