Control: tag -1 pending Hello Johannes and Ian,
Ian Jackson [2016-08-04 0:47 +0100]: > I see that after installing a recent autopkgtest, I no longer have > adt-virt-schroot, adt-virt-null, etc. I would like to suggest that > this change be reverted, for the following reasons: > [...] These are valid reasons for keeping the virt runners as separate programs and keep the communication protocol stable. However, these do not convince me as arguments that they have to be in $PATH. IMHO these are not programs which *users* would run on the command line -- I think the possible confusion of "what the heck does this do" and cluttering tab completion etc. is worse than the slight inconvenience of calling these by full path for the three people in the world who need to do that once a year. As for third-party users of the backends: Using the Python API (adt_testbed.py) is a lot easier and more robust than talking to the backend servers directly, due to all the encoding/decoding, timeout handling, environment passing etc. -- if the goal is to avoid code duplication, then using the virt backends directly only goes half way. I don't actually want to promote and recommend using virt/* directly for these reasons. > Otherwise the out-of-tree server has to go in > /usr/share/autopkgtest/virt, which is not really its bailiwick. > (And what if the virt server is a compiled machine executable and > unsuitable for /usr/share?) Both of these are only theoretical. Also, note that /usr/share/autopkgtest/virt/ is only the default path, you can always specify the full path to a virt server with autopkgtest(1). > I suggest that: > - the virt servers should be moved back to /usr/bin/adt-virt-* I committed https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/autopkgtest/autopkgtest.git/commit/?id=00d46b4ad3 to add backwards compat symlinks, to unbreak sbuild. Indeed I was not aware that other things used those, sorry for the hassle! But over time I would like to get rid of those together with the other adt* names, and have third-party users move to the private path. But I'll follow up to the sbuild bug about that. > - autopkgtest(1) should treat hyphen-less virt server names > the same way as chroot does: prefix them with `adt-virt-'. adt-virt* is an obsolete prefix -- it is still being tried if you invoke autopkgtest as "adt-run", but this is legacy/backwards compat shim only. In a private path there is little reason to prefix them with anything. Thanks, Martin -- Martin Pitt | http://www.piware.de Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com) | Debian Developer (www.debian.org)
