Although an interim release, there are a number of new features in 0.8.2 that are worth noting.
- emrecent - possible candidate for a rename to emdput, this script started off just as a review tool for recent builds (hence the current name). Finds recent .changes files in the Emdebian working directory, collates them, provides a viewer for the debc -a $ARCHcontents using whiptail or zenity along with error logging. If the default zenity frontend is installed, you can still select to use whiptail (e.g. when over an SSH connection) using the -w option to emrecent. Further checks are run using the second script:
- emdebcheck - a local Emdebian version of the debcheck that runs on the Debian archive using edos-debcheck to highlight non-installable packages before an upload breaks the archive. This isn't such a problem in Debian but Emdebian needs to build installer images and similar tools from packages in unstable so an installability check is very useful. Certain packages are expected to be non-installable due to dependencies that are removed in Emdebian so emrecent supports a --skip option to omit the emdebcheck run for such builds.
- emsource --status now reports errors logged by emrecent or emdebcheck.
- Unpacking support in emsandbox - EXPERIMENTAL!. debootstrap --foreign puts a higher-than-necessary burden on the host device when running the default --second-stage - not just in CPU workload but in the amount of free space required to copy and unpack all the .deb files. The original debootstrap tarball contains the downloaded .deb archives and only a few packages are actually unpacked manually. Unpacking support in emsandbox adds a handler using dpkg to unpack ALL .deb files in .$BUILDPLACE/var/cache/apt/archives/ using dpkg -e and dpkg -x, creates a suitable status file for dpkg and removes the .deb packages for a smaller tarball. The result is (almost) a foreign filesystem image that can be copied directly onto the host device. The remaining tasks are only:
- /sbin/ldconfig
- /usr/bin/dpkg --configure -a
. Depending on how well this works in real situations, unwrap could become the default handler for debootstrap --second-stage --foreign in emdebian-tools. Unpack support is enabled via the debootstrap suite scripts which define the package set, the first_stage_install and the (much reduced) second_stage, replacing the sequence of install commands with a single function provided by emdebian-tools. See /usr/lib/emdebian-tools/emdebian.gpe for an example.
In common with all previous interim Emdebian releases, 0.8.2 has been uploaded to the Emdebian tools repository already added to your apt sources when installing
emdebian-tools so apt will be able to upgrade seamlessly.
(0.8.0 introduced a check in
emsetup to ensure that the latest version has actually been installed.)
Once features have stabilised (probably after testing at Fosdem), I'll upload 0.9.0 to Debian unstable, as usual, or maybe one or two more interim releases to Emdebian.
