On 2023-06-29 12:53 +0200, Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues wrote: > Choosing #3c gets us more than just a simple and clean design. Encoding the > information of how a chroot should look like in the packages instead of the > bootstrapping tool allows creating chroots for Debian unstable all the way > back > to 2006-08-10 using debbisect or debootsnap. Yes, creating old chroots via > intermediary chroots is possible but it wastes processor cycles, adds > complexity and requires hardcoding timestamps in the tools doing the job > automatically. Letting the Essential:yes packages and their dependencies > decide > how a chroot is supposed to look like is also friendly to our derivatives as > they then no longer need to maintain their custom setup in a tool like > debootstrap. Choosing a component-based view on the bootstrapping problem does > not only give is a clean design but also desirable properties for creating > either old chroots from snapshot.d.o or chroots for derivatives without > requiring hardcoding things over and over again in several tools. > > I fear that we are sacrificing the benefits we get from using the component > based approach to software engineering. We are tempted by a quick-to-implement > solution to get things done now without having to think much more about it and > silently accept the long term costs for all tools in the bootstrapping space.
Thanks for writing this mail Josch. You saved me writing a long mail making many of the same points. It has long been a fundamental feature of Debian that it was just the sum of its parts (packages). Breaking that feature was a mistake and I was very disappointed that we chose to do that for a while as it didn't seem in line with our general favour of rigour over expediency. I too strongly favour 3c as a way to get back that fundamental property of non-hackiness, where the OS is just the unpacked packages, with ordering controlled by the dependency metadata. And kudos to Helmut for turning that massive thread into a cogent list of issues and options. It is much appreciated. I agree with the two consensus proposals Helmut put in the email at the top of this thread (that DEP17 is a good representation of the issues and that putting the files in the canonical locations is the long-term endpoint of this transition). Wookey -- Principal hats: Debian, Wookware, ARM http://wookware.org/
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