[elbe-devel] Elbe 5.0, Jessie

[Manuel Traut]

Hello Sebastian,

thanks for your mail!

On 16:00 Tue 23 Apr     , Hans Wurst wrote:
> 
> Hello Elbe Devs,
>  
> since the IRC seems to be a bit quiet atm I decided to drop you a message here.
>  
> After playing around with Elbe 5 (that solves an initvm create issue in Elbe 3 for me) I manage to build a stretch RFS.
> But my original project using a jessie does not work anymore.
>  
> I pocked around in the github logs and saw some topics along the same line.
> (
> https://github.com/Linutronix/elbe/commit/52784eabdbe5af3ce2f6d241b64456cfabe0f810
> https://github.com/Linutronix/elbe/commit/278190b7055de8b308322bc1107fb1dc98706928
> )
> 
> Will it ever be possible to build jessie images again on a stretch machine with Elbe 5?

The problem is some incompatibility in apt. Debootstrapping and installing
additional packages into a jessie target inside a stretch system runs into an
issue as described in the commit you already mentioned:
> https://github.com/Linutronix/elbe/commit/52784eabdbe5af3ce2f6d241b64456cfabe0f810

It will not be fixed in ELBE 5, because there are no 5.x releases anymore.
But maybe with ELBE 6, 7, 8, ..if someone provides a solution for the problem.
It was not of high priority during the process of providing an elbe version
that runs in a stretch initvm.

If you currently need to build a jessie project the only way is using
elbe v2.5. Packages are availabe here [0].

> The current status makes me a bit worried about the next debian version change.
> Will stretch not be supported when buster is the current release?
> Do you have a plan how to handle this?

Currently there are no plans how to handle this.

However we removed the need of an elbe-bootstrap package to ease the switch
between Debian releases in the initvm. But Elbe 5 uses runtime dependencies that
are not available in jessie, so it's not posible to run it in a jessie initvm.
However it is easy now, to produce an initvm of whatever Debian release you
want to use. Just replace the <suite> in the <initvm> section.

It is possible to create a buster RFS with a ELBE 5 generated initvm that is
running on stretch. However i'm not aware that there had been any tests using
buster or sid in the initvm.
If someone wants to help out, it would be nice to have these kind of tests.
This would be a good base for making plans.

Regards
  Manuel