Reviving (un)schroot?

Speaker: Helmut Grohne

Track: Packaging, policy, and Debian infrastructure

Type: Short talk (20 minutes)

Room: Grand amphi

Time: Jul 15 (Tue): 11:30

Duration: 0:20

The schroot tool has been the primary build backend used by sbuild for a long time. More and more work has gone into a new unshare backend that we are slowly transitioning to. It solves several problems with schroot ranging from convenience, via security to reproducibility. However, the unshare backend comes with several downsides. Effectively, it bundles a container runtime into sbuild. The new backend inevitably regresses some use cases such as conveniently interacting with chroot environments outside builds. The question arises: Can we provide the improvements gained from unshare via the schroot API to sbuild? I will present a proof-of-concept, its limitations and request feedback regarding what features are needed to make it practically useful.