Hi, as agreed with Adrian, here is what we just talked about in #debconf-grandamphi
Quoting John Paul Adrian Glaubitz (2025-07-15 10:57:24)
> I just tried the unshare backend in Debian Ports for the first time.
>
> After adding the subuids and subgids, I could start the build but it
> immediately
> failed as the FTP server used for mmdebstrap does not support the Debian Ports
> architecture powerpc:
11:13 < cbmuser> josch: Can you add out-of-the-box support for Debian Ports?
Currently mmdebstrap fails
for non-release architectures.
11:15 < josch> cbmuser: yes, i saw your bug -- the bigger problem is: how to
automatically create chroots
for distros other than debian main
11:15 < josch> we could hack in all sorts of exceptions into the code for that
11:15 < josch> but i'd like this to be part of distro-info-data
11:15 < josch> and then mmdebstrap could just query the distro-info-data
information for the requested
arch/release and do the right thing
11:16 < josch> cbmuser: juliank is working on improving distro-info-data to
include this information
11:16 < josch> so essentially, the answer is: yes, i'd like to do that and it
will get done once i find
the time and patches welcome :)
11:16 < josch> the plan is to move away from hard-coding exceptions and instead
use machine-readable
tables from distro-info-data (which do not exist yet)
11:16 < cbmuser> josch: Well, for Debian Ports, you just need to use a
different URL, that's all.
11:17 < josch> yes
11:17 < josch> but which different url
11:17 < cbmuser> And since qemu-user seems to be supported with the --arch=
option, that should work.
11:17 < josch> it would be yet another if(...) in the code
11:17 < josch> that's what i mean with hardcoding
11:17 < josch> yes it would
11:17 < josch> but i'd like to use machine-readable data as the source for this
11:17 < cbmuser> josch: http://deb.debian.org/debian-ports
11:17 < josch> because debian-ports is not the only distro with this problem
11:17 < josch> cbmuser: yes, i know the url
11:17 < josch> but i would not like to hardcode it
11:17 < josch> i would like to have a solution that uses centrally managed
information about the mirror
url
11:18 < josch> and that information should be in distro-info-data
11:18 < josch> it is not yet but juliank is working on it
11:18 < josch> if you find the time, you can help working on making that happen
11:18 < cbmuser> josch: https://salsa.debian.org/mirror-team/masterlist
11:19 < josch> cbmuser: so you propose that sbuild does a HTTP GET query every
time it runs to figure out
the mapping?
11:19 < josch> cbmuser: would you not say that storing this in a local package
like distor-info-data so
that you can build even without an internet connection is the
better option?
11:19 < cbmuser> No, I was not proposing fetching that data from the web, of
course ;-)
11:20 < cbmuser> I was just saying we have such a centrally managed list
already.
11:20 < josch> yes, now we need to put it somewhere that is packaged, like
distro-info-data
11:20 < cbmuser> d-i has choose-mirror which uses this, so we could also put
this into a deb package.
11:21 < josch> whichever way the information is stored, once it is in a .deb i
will modify mmdebstrap to
query that information and do the right thing
11:21 < josch> cbmuser: maybe talk with juliank as he has some plans
11:22 < cbmuser> Sounds like a good idea.
11:22 < josch> cbmuser: mind if i copypaste our conversation just now into the
bug to not loose track of
the current state?
11:22 < cbmuser> Please go ahead.
11:22 < josch> thanks
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