Re: [PATCH v1 0/6] Migrate to mmdebstrap

[Baurzhan Ismagulov <ibr@radix50.net>]

On 2023-05-12 21:50, 'Henning Schild' via isar-users wrote:
> Maybe you can add a few words on the relevance and the sustainability
> of mmdebstrap and compare it to debootstrap. Is it an official debian
> supported tool, where does upstream use it, do we align with debian
> strategy here?
> 
> As far as i remember we came from multistrap and eventually switches to
> debootstrap. And the reasons have been around multistrap being somehow
> not official or sustainable.

Some points that quickly come to mind are:

* mmdebstrap is part of Debian and claims e.g. the following advantages
  compared to debootstrap: Direct debootstrapping from multiple repos,
  reproducible, unprivileged operation, apt-less chroots (and more in [1]).

* What we'd like to have:

  * Introspection ("what will be installed") before actually installing stuff,
    necessary for upfront base-apt and Debian dependency support in bitbake.

  * Unprivileged bootstrapping, for later unprivileged building in unprivileged
    containers.

  * Bootstrapping from multiple repos in one pass (installing security and
    custom-built packages doesn't require updating and upgrading).

  * Go away from shell, preferably towards Python.

  * Replace qemu-debootstrap which is deprecated.

  mmdebstrap satisfies this except that it is written in Perl.

* Regarding multistrap, the author said he didn't maintain it anymore. Moving
  back to Bourne shell, no introspection and two-stage bootstrap + upgrade to
  security repo was a regression which I didn't like. Retrospectively, I think
  we could have maintained multistrap as well -- there are people in emdebian
  community who need it and we've discussed reimplementing it in Python (in the
  end, no changes which would require toucing multistrap have been introduced
  till today). Given mmdebstrap, we're postponing the reimplementation for an
  indefinite period of time -- the same policy as with bitbake which suits our
  needs as is to 80 %.

1. https://gitlab.mister-muffin.de/josch/mmdebstrap#the-sales-pitch-in-comparison-to-debootstrap

With kind regards,
Baurzhan