Cannot override data_dir [was: dl-ubuntu-test-iso in stable (rev 3) bustimicated]

[Heather Ellsworth]

in distro-info data_dir is hardcoded to /usr/share/distro-info and cannot be relocated.

== Original description ==
I can't seem to run this tool.

$ dl-ubuntu-test-iso --flavor=ubuntu --variant=desktop --arch=amd64 --release=focal --build=pending --isoroot=/storage/iso
distro_info is bustimacated

$ snap run dl-ubuntu-test-iso
distro_info is bustimacated

$ dl-ubuntu-test-iso --help
distro_info is bustimacated

-----------------------------------------------

$ snap list dl-ubuntu-test-iso
Name Version Rev Tracking Publisher Notes
dl-ubuntu-test-iso 20200425 3 latest/stable jibel -

Maybe it's just user error and I need some direction in fixing up the command.

[Steve Beattie (sbeattie)]

Hi Heather,

Thanks for reporting this bug and your interest in using the dl-ubuntu-test-iso script.

It's not user error, there's an unfortunate period in the new release cycle opening process where the distro-info package lags what the actual status is, causing it throw an exception (that the dl-ubuntu-test-iso catches and gives the rather unhelpful message you see).

You can see the specific traceback by doing the following lookup manually:

$ python3
Python 3.8.2 (default, Mar 13 2020, 10:14:16)
[GCC 9.3.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import distro_info
>>> info = distro_info.UbuntuDistroInfo()
>>> current_release = info.devel()
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/distro_info.py", line 136, in devel
    raise DistroDataOutdated()
distro_info.DistroDataOutdated: Distribution data outdated. Please check for an update for distro-info-data. See /usr/share/doc/distro-info-data/README.Debian for details.
>>>

Conceivably the script could do something smarter in this situation to figure out the release name of the version(s) under development; I have a vague recollection of it doing a launchpad api lookup before distro-info was added to the archive, but people didn't like that slowness on startup just to look up the release names.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

I observed this crash happening on the day of the release of 20.04 LTS and at that point in time we did not have a name for 20.10 so looking up the information in Launchpad would not have helped.

Its worth noting that distro-info uses a '<' rather than a '<=' and fixing that would help for a day.

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement (jibel)]

For the snap, this is because data_dir in distro_info is hardcoded to /usr/share/distro_info/ whichi corresponds to the version included in core18 not the version that ships with the snap itself.

Version 20200427 (1754) of core18 contains the right data file with information about groovy.

distro-info could be updated to allow an override of data_dir instead of using a hard coded path.

Meanwhile you can either wait until latest core18 is released to stable or upgrade core18 to latest/candidate.