[backportpackage] create chroot if necessary

[Iain Lane]

(Does it do this already?) It would be nice to be able to ask backport requesters to test-build their packages with a single backportpackage command that would set their system up appropriately. I believe this is almost possible, but for the chroot creation. backportpackage could create a pbuilder chroot (for example) if none is available already. Perhaps with a flag --create.

[Benjamin Drung (bdrung)]

How can I check, if a chroot exists? I need this logic for pbuilder and sbuild.

[Stefano Rivera (stefanor)]

For pbuilder, I guess we have to assume the standard pbuilderrc, and look for /var/cache/pbuilder/$release-$arch.tgz.
Pbuilder-dist: ~/pbuilder/$release.tgz and ~/pbuilder/$release-$arch.tgz for foreign architectures.
sbuild: schroot - l | grep chroot:$release:$arch

[Benjamin Drung (bdrung)]

I don't like the "assume" for pbuilder. There is too much room for failures.

[Stefano Rivera (stefanor)]

We already are assuming that "DIST" will specify the distribution

[Richard Hansen (rhansen)]

I don't like the assumption either -- my .pbuilderrc sets BASETGZ to something else. What about spawning a shell that does something like the following:

    for f in /etc/pbuilderrc "${HOME}"/.pbuilderrc; do
        ! [ -f "${f}" ] || . "${f}" || exit 1
    done
    printf %s "${BASETGZ:-/var/cache/pbuilder/base.tgz}"

and then capture its output. That output should be the filename whose existence should be tested for pbuilder builds.

[Dan Streetman (ddstreet)]

as this is ~10 years old, i'm closing as wontfix