Question about base-apt: Usage of BASE_DISTRO instead of DISTRO

[Claudius Heine <claudius.heine.ext@siemens.com>]

Hi,

I am currently investigating a CI issue, and some input would be nice to 
have, since it touches code I am not that familiar with.

This is the log:

ERROR: mc:qemuarm-buster:isar-image-base-debian-buster-qemuarm 
do_cache_base_repo: Function failed: do_cache_base_repo (log file is 
located at 
/workspace/build/isar_claudius_ilbers_fast_ci/26/build/tmp/work/debian-buster-armhf/isar-image-base-debian-buster-qemuarm/temp/log.do_cache_base_repo.14542)
ERROR: Logfile of failure stored in: 
/workspace/build/isar_claudius_ilbers_fast_ci/26/build/tmp/work/debian-buster-armhf/isar-image-base-debian-buster-qemuarm/temp/log.do_cache_base_repo.14542
Log data follows:
| dpkg: warning: failed to open configuration file '/root/.dpkg.cfg' for 
reading: Permission denied
| DEBUG: Executing shell function do_cache_base_repo
| Cannot find definition of distribution 'buster'!
| There have been errors!
| WARNING: exit code 249 from a shell command.
| ERROR: Function failed: do_cache_base_repo (log file is located at 
/workspace/build/isar_claudius_ilbers_fast_ci/26/build/tmp/work/debian-buster-armhf/isar-image-base-debian-buster-qemuarm/temp/log.do_cache_base_repo.14542)
NOTE: recipe isar-image-base-debian-buster-qemuarm: task 
do_cache_base_repo: Failed
ERROR: Task 
(multiconfig:qemuarm-buster:/workspace/build/isar_claudius_ilbers_fast_ci/26/meta-isar/recipes-core/images/isar-image-base.bb:do_cache_base_repo) 
failed with exit code '1'

That happens because 'buster' was not added to the repository configuration:

build/downloads/base-apt/apt/debian/conf/distributions:
   Codename: stretch
   Architectures: i386 armhf arm64 amd64 source
   Components: main

The reason for that is that base-apt does not add a distribution entry, 
if there is already a configuration file in place.

meta/recipes-devtools/base-apt/base-apt.bb:
[...]
CACHE_CONF_DIR = "${REPO_BASE_DIR}/${BASE_DISTRO}/conf"
[...]
     if [ ! -e "${CACHE_CONF_DIR}/distributions" ]; then
         sed -e "s#{CODENAME}#"${BASE_DISTRO_CODENAME}"#g" \
             ${WORKDIR}/distributions.in > ${CACHE_CONF_DIR}/distributions
         if [ "${BASE_REPO_KEY}" ] ; then
             # To generate Release.gpg
             echo "SignWith: yes" >> ${CACHE_CONF_DIR}/distributions
         fi
     fi
[...]

What I currently don't understand is why the path to the repositories 
contains BASE_DISTRO instead of DISTRO and is causing this kind of conflict?

I would now just rename the mentions of BASE_DISTRO to use DISTRO, but I 
don't know if that is possible breaking the design here. To me that 
looks a bit too deliberate to be just a bug.

My question is if the base-apt repository is meant to hold repositories 
for different codenames and `base-apt` simply sets it wrong, or if we 
want to have different repositories for each codename to avoid any 
conflicts.

regards,
Claudius

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