autopkgtest-buildvm-ubuntu-cloud does not require dependencies to start

[Ural Tunaboyu]

Running autopkgtest-buildvm-ubuntu-cloud on a fresh install (as of 5.37ubuntu3 on noble) will download the requested release image before trying to use the required packages to build it such as genisoimage and qemu-utils.

If these packages are not present in the system the process will fail here, after downloading the iso and will require a re-download after installing the required packages.

It should check that the necessary packages are installed before spending time downloading the image.

[Tim Andersson (ssstr1pe)]

apt-get install autopkgtest --install-suggests

will install these packages with a fresh install :)

apt show autopkgtest

will show all of the recommended packages for autopkgtest

We obviously can't get these as dependencies for the package itself but an upstream PR which adds a check into the script sounds great :)

[Paride Legovini (paride)]

--install-suggests will install more or less everything that may be needed, but that's normally too much: e.g. you probably don't want lxd *and* incus. This bug report is an instance of

  https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1034351

and similar to:

  https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1076739

which has interesting pointers to possible solutions to this issue, including splitting the package.

In the end looks like consensus is that we want tools to check for required dependencies at runtime, as Tim mentioned. This is not as trivial as it sounds (e.g. we may need a dependency if not running as root, see discussion on fakemachine).

Also: it would be nice to have this functionality factored out from individual scripts, so that we don't duplicate it. But some are Python, some shell scripts, so again: not trivial as it sounds.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package autopkgtest - 5.42ubuntu2

---------------
autopkgtest (5.42ubuntu2) plucky; urgency=medium

  * tests/testdesc: replace "c64" and "vax" with archs that actually exist

 -- Paride Legovini <email address hidden> Fri, 22 Nov 2024 15:37:37 +0100