On Wed, Mar 13, 2019 at 01:15:02PM +0100, Johannes Schauer wrote: > I'm not advocating for doing "hacks here and there so that bootstrapping tools > work properly" as you put it but that we think about the question of whether > maybe there is a better way to populate an empty directory with software > components that does not require as much magic as currently has to be supplied > by tools like debootstrap. The result would not be "hacks here and there" but > a > cleaner and more robust setup procedure. > > So what I want you to take away from this long mail is: maybe we should > re-think the way we are currently creating a Debian chroot because maybe there > exists a different approach that would give us benefits that are actually > important to our users and make maintaining the universal operating system > easier?
Sounds good in theory, but I'd like to know what kind of new architecture are you thinking of, how would it be implemented, or how would it work in practice. For example, for people bootstrapping new architectures, we introduced build-stages (afaik now called build-profiles). (The <!nojava> in gettext, for example). Maybe in the same line we could add a special Depends field only meaningful for bootstrapping tools? Is this the sort of thing you have in mind? I would certainly consider a lot cleaner to add a new field to base-files in the form "Bootstrap-Depends: base-passwd" than converting all chowns in postinst to use integer numbers. Thanks.
