[elbe-devel] Elbe 2.x installs additional/unnecessary packages in RFS (possible regression wrt 1.x)

[Manuel Traut]

Hi Lukasz,

On Thu, Jan 04, 2018 at 10:56:05AM +0000, Lukasz Walewski wrote:
> >-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
> >Von: Manuel Traut [mailto:manuel.traut at linutronix.de]
> >Gesendet: Mittwoch, 3. Januar 2018 06:58
> >An: Lukasz Walewski
> >Cc: elbe-devel at linutronix.de
> >Betreff: Re: [elbe-devel] Elbe 2.x installs additional/unnecessary
> >packages in RFS (possible regression wrt 1.x)
> >
> >Hi Lukasz.
> 
> Hi Manuel,
> 
> >Is it posible to <purge>apt-listchanges</purge> via finetuning?
> 
> Well... yes. However, it removes only this very package - its dependencies remain, even if you run "apt-get autoremove" afterwards. In order to get rid of all of them one needs to do:
> 
> <purge>apt-listchanges</purge>
> <purge>python-apt</purge>
> <purge>python-apt-common</purge>
> <purge>python-support</purge>
> <purge>python</purge>
> <purge>python-minimal</purge>
> <purge>python2.7</purge>
> <purge>python2.7-minimal</purge>
> 
> ...in exactly that order, otherwise you get dependency problems.
> 
> Besides, I don't think it's a general solution: the image I was talking so far intentionally uses python3. Another one, that I use as a rescue image, still uses python2 so I must not purge python2.7* packages or my image will turn out useless.
> 
> Side note: one needs to be careful with the finetuning command order. If you issue your <purge> commands after you removed the dpkg database in /var/lib/dpkg/info as recommended by the manual or renamed the whole /var tree into /var_debian as demonstrated in /examples, you obviously get the following error:
> 
> running cmd +chroot /var/cache/elbe/ID/target dpkg --purge apt-listchanges+
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> dpkg: error: unable to access dpkg status area: No such file or directory
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Command failed with errorcode 2
> Finetuning Error, trying to continue anyways
> 
> I hope for a solution that doesn't require the user to modify their XML, exclusively to go from 1.2 to 2.x without breaking reproducibility.

Thanks for analysing this! I created a new issue [0] for the problem.

I'm also thinking about setting up a test-case that detects these kind of
problems earlier by verifying the build-output of current-stable and
devel-versions of elbe..

[0] https://github.com/Linutronix/elbe/issues/138