Backstory: I'm preparing to request that the signond package from Debian be synced into Ubuntu, replacing our existing signon package. As signon in Ubuntu has been more-or-less abandoned for a good while now, the package is old, but it ships multiple libraries, and those libraries have quite a few reverse depends. For this reason, I need to have every reverse dependency autopkgtested against the new signond packages in a PPA, lest I severely clog up the archive. I've decided to take the most painful but accurate way possible to get a list of packages that need autopkgtested, and that is to set up a local Britney instance following the instructions at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ProposedMigration/LocalSetup.

I've encountered numerous pitfalls and stumbling blocks in the process, but finally managed to get Britney to run, only to discover that after it finished running, it did not issue any autopkgtest requests for me to read. Inspecting its output a bit, the reason became clear - signond depends on many packages in universe, but signond itself *appears to be in main* from Britney's perspective. This is because when you upload to a PPA, it always goes into a repo component named "main". Ubuntu's version of Britney therefore thinks that signond is in main, and so spits out a bunch of Impossible Depends errors because of the dependencies in universe. This would be correct if signond was actually in main... but it's not, it's in a PPA.

Some possible solutions I can think of:

* Hack some of the files downloaded by the bileto fetch-indexes script so that signond appears to be coming from universe. Likely to work, could be very difficult.
* Disarm the check for universe dependencies in main. Possibly could work.
* Create a new component named "universe" in my PPA and upload to it. That seems like it would be a relatively clean and easy solution, but I have absolutely no clue how I would go about doing this, and suspect it's not even possible.

All of these seem less than ideal (except for the last one, which would be awesome if it were possible). Any further ideas? If not, which one of the above should I try?

--
Aaron Rainbolt
Lubuntu Developer
Matrix: @arraybolt3:matrix.org
IRC: arraybolt3 on irc.libera.chat
GitHub: https://github.com/ArrayBolt3


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