There are multiple issues reported in a single bug. > This means that I cannot create a Debian chroot from Debian unstable from 10 > years ago from snapshot.debian.org without merged-/usr and thus my chroot > will behave differently as it did back then. > Please re-enable --no-merged-usr so that I can re-create old chroots from > snapshot.d.o again.
I don't think debootstrap has such goals, or requirement to be able to bootstrap rolling release without a changing codename like unstable/sid. debootstrap already sets options that may not be supported or lead to incorrect chroots if debootstrap & scripts are used from too far away time window for a rolling release. If you desire to re-create a debootstrap of unstable as it looked 10 years ago, it is best to do it using 10 years old debootstrap from the said snapshot archive too. Note that stable/testing are not affected as much, because the rolling alias is resolved to a codename, and hence doing debootstrap from an old snapshot of "stable" will do what the codename "lenny" wants, although there is no guarantee that current debootstrap will resolve things the same way as the 10 year old debootstrap did. Allowing --no-merged-usr option unguarded may lead to users creating incorrect installations and chroots for the future releases, especially since packages can assume merged-usr in the upcoming releases. I wonder if I can do some further checks, I.e. if unstable, and the InRelease / Release Date is old, do split-usr. I.e. anything before 2022. Effectively implement a time guard "old-sid" vs "new-sid", since the codename for sid has not changed. Thus allowing to bootstrap old sid snapshots in a manner closer to what old debootstrap from said snapshot would do. But still wIthout any guarantees that it will be identical. > Also, build chroots must still be created without merged-usr for > sid/bookworm, until something's been done to migrate user systems. But Julien, you said that buildds run stable, meaning they are unaffected by this debootstrap change in sid/bookworm. > Please point out what you plan to do about this change in debootstrap so that > I can adapt the mmdebstrap autopkgtest accordingly. I did notice the mmdebstrap autopkgtest regression. I also noticed that mmdebstrap does not support --merged-usr flag, and instead offers three ways of creating chroots that are merged-usr. To match the current debootstrap behaviour in sid, as currently implemented in debootstrap in sid, it seems to me that mmdebstrap should auto-enable `--setup-hook=/usr/share/mmdebstrap/hooks/merged-usr/setup00.sh` for sid/bookworm, but somehow continue to honor user supplied --setup-hooks (append? override?) I was going to file a bug report about that after using mmdebstrap, as I have not used it yet and not sure how that would fit into UX and user expectations. -- Regards, Dimitri.
