Re: Discussion: Base-apt features

[Baurzhan Ismagulov <ibr@radix50.net>]

On Wed, Sep 25, 2019 at 02:32:32PM +0530, Vijai Kumar K wrote:
> > > 3. Support for specifying the signing key.
...
> By using "SignWith: yes", we are asking reprepro to use the default key of the system.
> BTW, there is a possibility that the key we specified using BASE_REPO_KEY might not be
> the default key of the system. 

Ah, that's the signing part, thanks for the explanation.


> > > 5. Refactoring code to consolidate reprepro calls.
> > 
> > I'd suggest to evaluate other tools and libs like python-apt and / or aptly.
> > After looking at Acquire::By-Hash use cases in more detail, I've seen that we
> > do need it. According to Jan, it isn't supported by reprepro. I think in the
> > long term, we'll have to use python-apt and touch bitbake to get everything
> > right.
> 
> Thanks for the info. I have been wondering regarding the need to move out of
> reprepo. This gives some fair amount of detail. Let me also have a look at
> the other tools.

In the long term, there is more to that. Currently, we rely on bitbake pipeline
when populating base-apt. To cover all use cases correctly (e.g., updating
base-apt if upstream changes, removing packages not used anymore, etc.), we'd
have to do more stuff statically upfront (including debootstrap). To achieve
that, we might have to extract the functionality to a separate tool using
python-apt, touch bitbake, or both. This functionality may also be necessary
e.g. for determining Build-Depends: of debianized external sources (such as
hello-isar) and reflecting that in the pipeline (currently not possible, since
bitbake determines that before fetching and Debian -- after).

With kind regards,
Baurzhan.