Launchpad builder changes: schroot and LXD

[Dimitri John Ledkov]

On 6 September 2017 at 12:36, Colin Watson <cjwatson at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>
> As of launchpad-buildd 149, deployed to production on 2017-09-04, the
> following changes are effective on Launchpad's build farm:
>
>  * sbuild (used to build .debs from source packages) uses its schroot
>    mode to perform chroot operations rather than sudo.  This is closer
>    to how Debian builders behave and to how developers typically run
>    sbuild interactively, and it means that the inactivity timeout
>    actually works properly rather than leaving builds in a state where
>    they have to be cancelled manually.
>
>    There are some small differences in the environment observed from
>    inside a build, of which the most important are probably that HOME is
>    now set to a nonexistent directory, and V=1 is set to cause various
>    build systems to be more verbose (we made this change in 2014 but it
>    was lost somewhere along the way).  See [1] for more details.
>

There have been, at least in the past, packages in ubuntu that do rely
on HOME being a real directory and would FTBFS locally when HOME
pointed to non-existant directory, but would build fine in launchpad.

Hence I have 'HOME' => '/build/' in my ~/.sbuildrc. I shall drop that
now, to match launchpad's new behavior.

But something to be aware of.

>  * Snaps and live filesystems are now built in LXD containers rather
>    than in chroots, laying the groundwork for them to be able to install
>    snaps as build-dependencies.
>
> At the moment the only known regressions from this are in some corner
> cases of live filesystem building (powerpc and CPC).  Let us know if you
> see anything else amiss, although as usual please try to reproduce
> problems locally before attributing them to the build environment.


This has been noticed for the CPC case, and is trivially reporducible
with lxd and the OddBloke's cloud builder. I had an updated lxd
profile from steve that supposedly does work, shall I test that, and
do you need the updated (less restrictive) lxd profile for the devirt
CPC livecd builds? A priviledged lxd container alone is not enough
there.

-- 
Regards,

Dimitri.