autopkgtest should not depend on pbuilder

I think that moving to mk-build-deps would be a step into the wrong direction. Right now we pull in

# apt-get install --no-install-recommends pbuilder
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
  debootstrap libidn11 libssl1.0.0 wget
Suggested packages:
  pbuilder-uml gdebi-core cowdancer
Recommended packages:
  sudo devscripts
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  debootstrap libidn11 libssl1.0.0 pbuilder wget
0 upgraded, 5 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 1861 kB of archives.
After this operation, 5257 kB of additional disk space will be used.

But with devscripts it's much worse:

# apt-get install --no-install-recommends devscripts
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
  libexpat1 libpython3-stdlib libpython3.3-minimal libpython3.3-stdlib libsqlite3-0 libssl1.0.0 mime-support
  python3 python3-minimal python3.3 python3.3-minimal
Suggested packages:
  bsd-mailx mailx cvs-buildpackage devscripts-el gnuplot libauthen-sasl-perl libfile-desktopentry-perl
  libnet-smtp-ssl-perl libterm-size-perl libyaml-syck-perl mutt ssh-client svn-buildpackage w3m
  debian-keyring equivs libcrypt-ssleay-perl libsoap-lite-perl python3-doc python3-tk python3.3-doc
  binfmt-support
Recommended packages:
  at dctrl-tools dput dupload libdistro-info-perl libjson-perl libparse-debcontrol-perl liburi-perl
  libwww-perl lintian man-db patchutils python3-debian python3-magic strace unzip wdiff wget curl file
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  devscripts libexpat1 libpython3-stdlib libpython3.3-minimal libpython3.3-stdlib libsqlite3-0 libssl1.0.0
  mime-support python3 python3-minimal python3.3 python3.3-minimal
0 upgraded, 12 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 7335 kB of archives.
After this operation, 22.6 MB of additional disk space will be used.

Hm, I was going to use equivs, but even that pulls in over twice the size of dependencies (4 MB for pbuilder, 9.2 MB for equivs, both with --no-install-recommends) on a minimal debootstrapped container. I also experimented with directly writing a DEBIAN/control file and calling dpkg-deb -b on it. I think that's the minimal solution, but it requires manual resolution and filtering of arch specific dependencies. E. g. right now your test can do "Depends: foo [armhf ppc64el]" or even [linux-any], and dpkg-deb does not understand this. That's probably the reason why equivs builds a source package instead of just building the binary directly.

It may be possible to use dpkg-gencontrol or the Dpkg::Control perl modules to do that arch-specific dependency filtering; pulling in just dpkg-dev pulls in 3.3 MB instead of 4, which is the only case of actually reducing dependencies.

Just using libdpkg-perl would be nice, it's just 216 kB.

This works nicely:

use Dpkg::Deps;
$spec = 'nopkg | pmount (>= 0.9 ), pep8 [linux-any], coreutils (>= 1) [armhf],';
$dep = deps_parse($spec, reduce_arch => 1, host_arch => 'armhf');
print $dep->output(), "\n";

results in "nopkg | pmount (>= 0.9), pep8, coreutils (>= 1)", and if I set host_arch to "amd64" it results in "nopkg | pmount (>= 0.9), pep8" as expected. autopkgtest can get the target arch from the testbed with "dpkg --print-architecture", which does not require any non-essential dependencies.

http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=autopkgtest/autopkgtest.git;a=commitdiff;h=79c094503b

This bug was fixed in the package autopkgtest - 2.15

---------------
autopkgtest (2.15) unstable; urgency=medium

  * Fix --apt-source mode to download the source with apt-get's
    "--only-source" option, to actually get what we asked for.
  * Add missing python3 build dependency for tests/adt-run. Fixes FTBFS of
    backports.
  * adt-buildvm-ubuntu-cloud: Add options to pass custom metadata/userdata.
    Thanks Diogo Matsubara.
  * Replace pbuilder-satisfydepends-classic with parsing and satisfying build
    and test dependencies with libdpkg-perl and "apt-get -f install". This
    gets rid of the pbuilder dependency and some nasty hacks like the
    --internal-chrootexec script, and allows us to be more flexible such as
    also supporting Recommends: installation. (LP: #1205110)
  * Fix "specifiy" typo in error message. Thanks Jelmer Vernooij.
    (Closes: #745413)
  * adt-build-lxc: Stop using the -F template option to flush the cache as it
    is not available in the debian template. Remove caches manually instead.
    (Closes: #745415)
  * adt-buildvm-ubuntu-cloud: Fall back to latest stable if there is no
    development series.
  * Add "needs-recommends" restriction for installation of recommended
    packages for the test dependencies. This does not affect build
    dependencies. (Closes: #708963)

 -- Martin Pitt <email address hidden> Tue, 22 Apr 2014 09:10:40 +0200