touch-packages team mailing list archive

[Martin Pitt <martin.pitt@xxxxxxxxxx>]

This fix will now get along with a completely empty /var/lib/apt/lists/.
Note that the directory /var/lib/apt/lists/partial/ itself still needs
to be present (otherwise apt/python-apt will try to re-create it), but
it does not need to contain any files any more. This should address this
immediate bug and is unintrusive. I uploaded it to wily now and also
uploaded a backport to the overlay PPA (2.17.2-0ubuntu1.3touch1). I
tested this on mako on the rc-proposed/ubuntu channel, image #228.


This does not yet address snappy as completely dropping the dpkg
database will lose any association of a file to a package, and thus also
disable package hooks and the like. It's conceivable to write a
completely new packaging backend for snappy which doesn't use dpkg/apt
any more. But this shouldn't just be a drive-by bug report and is a lot
of work:

  * Snappy team should discuss what kind of bug reports and crashes they
expect for the snappy OS itself. I suppose this should not apply to
third-party snaps but only the Ubuntu-provided minimal OS (or rather big
desktop in case of personal). E. g. we supposedly don't need any kind of
"Package:" error, we might not want the normal Ubuntu package hooks.
Also, do you want the usual Package:/Dependencies: information, or
something simpler (just the image version, etc.)?

  * Snappy team should discuss what kind of UI they want: Should crash
reports be always sent non-interactively, phone style? Or should there
be some UI to address privacy issues?

 * Is apport even still the right tool for this, or overly complex for
Snappy and you actually just care for crashes? (There are alternatives
like http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/coredumpctl.html)

 * If the above discussion decides that the snappy team still wants the
features of apport, we need a new apport packaging backend which can
implement the API in http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~apport-
hackers/apport/trunk/view/head:/apport/packaging.py without referring to
dpkg/apt. I. e. this would mostly mean to provide an online service to
map a file to a package, a file and a system image version to a package
version, map a package of a particular version/system image to its
dependencies, etc.

I. e. the snappy side of this requires some discussions and a proper
blueprint. This shouldn't block this immediate phone issue which is
apparently rather urgent, so I went ahead with the above simple and
focussed fix.

** Changed in: canonical-devices-system-image
       Status: Confirmed => Fix Committed

-- 
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Touch seeded packages, which is subscribed to apport in Ubuntu.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1489410

Title:
  do not require apt lists to be pre-installed

Status in Canonical System Image:
  Fix Committed
Status in apport package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Committed

Bug description:
  On the phone images the space required for the lists in
  /var/lib/apt/lists is excessive (around 70MB) for the device targets
  we have. The partition it currently resides in did not include this
  requirement when their size was specified.

  Removing those prevents one from using apport-cli to report bugs about
  packages that are from the -updates pocket. This is due to the fact
  that apport will not allow one to report bugs about packages which it
  cannot determine are from the official archive or a native origin PPA.

  Possible solutions include generating the list dynamically as part of
  the writable partition or including a smaller  simpler manifest.

  This report was inspired by bug #1471903

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