Bug#1031325: e2fsprogs 1.47.0 introduces a breaking change into Bookworm, breaking grub and making installations of Ubuntu and Debian releases via debootstrap impossible
On Fri, Feb 17, 2023 at 12:43:01PM -0700, Sam Hartman wrote:
>
> I am not entirely convinced that using current rather than guest
> tools for image building is an anti-pattern. You've been working on
> filesystems for a long time; I've been working on various image
> building projects since my first watchmaker project at MIT.
For what it's worth, I've been building test appliances[1] for the
purposes of file system testing since 2013 (initially just for Qemu,
but now for Cloud[2] environments as well as Android[3]). Admittedly,
I haven't been doing this as long as you, but I'm not unfamiliar with
building appliance images using debootstrap, and I've *always* built
my KVM/Qemu images using a build chroot[4], including the mkfs and
debootstrap steps.
[1] https://github.com/tytso/xfstests-bld/blob/master/test-appliance/gen-image
[2] https://thunk.org/gce-xfstests
[3] https://thunk.org/android-xfstests
[4] https://github.com/tytso/xfstests-bld/blob/master/setup-buildchroot
So I'm happy to talk to you off-line about best practices for building
images, but this is something that I do *regularly*, since there are
weekly updates from upstream xfstests. Thus, I have personal
experience that using a build chroot for image creation really is
*not* *that* *hard*. For that matter, when I'm doing test appliance
development, I'm running regression tests[5] several times a day which
build images in a chroot.
[5] https://github.com/tytso/xfstests-bld/blob/master/selftests/appliance
Everything is automated. No fuss, no muss, no dirty dishes. :-)
Futher, it provides better build reproducibility, no matter who is
building the image, and it also makes full GPL compliance (if you are
publishing the test appliances) much, *much* easier --- I can provide
an exhaustive list of all components (including mkfs.ext4!) and control
scripts involved with the creation of the image.
Cheers,
- Ted
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