Please backport pbuilder

[Umang Varma]

The current version of pbuilder in karmic cannot build base tarballs from Debian repositories like squeeze and sid because apt is no longer "Essential". As a result, debootstrap doesn't install apt when trying to build a base tarball for sid. Since pbuilder uses apt while creating the base tarball, it fails to create the base tarball, since it cannot find apt-get. This means that anyone trying to use pbuilder to make a Debian (post lenny) base tarball cannot, unless they make (currently) undocumented changes to their .pbuilderrc. pbuilder 0.196 fixes this issue and includes apt when it runs debootstrap.

I have downloaded the source package from lucid and built it using pbuilder with a karmic base tarball successfully. I have installed this version and it created a base tarball for sid successfully. It is also lintian clean (fusses about a hyphen, an asterix and an empty line only if you pass the -I option to lintian). It should not be hard to backport this.

The only change that might need to be made from the package from lucid would be to make karmic the default distribution in pbuilderrc.

Thank you

Here is the changelog. The last but one item in the 0.196 unstable entry fixes this issue.

pbuilder (0.196ubuntu1) lucid; urgency=low

  * Merge with Debian unstable (lp: #502135). Remaining changes:
    - pbuilderrc, debian/pbuilder.config, debian/pbuilder.templates: Set
      default archive mirror to "archive.ubuntu.com".
    - pbuilderrc: Set default distribution to "lucid".

 -- Michael Bienia <email address hidden> Sat, 02 Jan 2010 14:30:46 +0100

pbuilder (0.196) unstable; urgency=low

  [ Loïc Minier ]
  * Add comments to check target.
  * Use GNU-style vars for system directories, allow to set them from the
    env, and let them be prefixed with a PBUILDER_ROOT directory to allow
    relocation.
  * Add helpers to relocate pbuilder in testsuite.
  * Use a relocated pbuilder setup to run test_debuildopts; closes: #562681.

  [ Junichi Uekawa ]
  * Add Loic to uploaders.

  [ Loïc Minier ]
  * pbuilder: add support for setting the architecture on the command-line
    and in pbuilderrc.
  * pdebuild: add support for setting the architecture on the command-line
    and in pbuilderrc; closes: #516625.
  * Set testsuite mirror depending on FQDN.
  * Always prepend --include=apt to debootstrap args; this is needed when
    using --variant=buildd which doesn't include apt since pbuilder calls
    apt-get in the chroot. Note that this can still be overrident by the
    end-user by passing another --include= flag via DEBOOTSTRAPOPTS since
    these flags aren't cumulative in debootstrap.
  * Update testsuite logs; note that update-squeeze-sid-experimental fails
    due to #563049.

 -- Loïc Minier <email address hidden> Fri, 01 Jan 2010 18:52:04 +0100

[Umang Varma (umang)]

A patch file is not required. The only change is in pbuilderrc, line 17: s/lucid/karmic/

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

karmic is no longer supported and receives no further updates