#1135581 sbuild: "apt distclean" provides no commandline option to enable/disable

Package:
sbuild
Source:
sbuild
Submitter:
Vagrant Cascadian
Date:
2026-06-27 10:21:02 UTC
Severity:
normal
Tags:
#1135581#5
Date:
2026-05-03 01:30:44 UTC
From:
To:
In an earlier version of sbuild "apt distclean" was enabled by default:

sbuild (0.91.3) unstable; urgency=medium

  [ Jochen Sprickerhof ]
  * Actually use UNSHARE_MMDEBSTRAP_ENV_CMD
  * Replace APT_UPDATE_ARCHIVE_ONLY by static definition
  * Enable apt distclean by default
...

While this is a perfectly reasonable default in many respects, and there
is a way to turn it off in the sbuild configuration file by setting:

  $clean_apt_cache = 0;

There are some corner cases where this behavior would be nice to disable
on an ad-hoc basis, for which a commandline option such as
--no-apt-distclean would make sense (or something that mirrors the
variable name?). Or possibly extending the --no-apt-clean to also not
run distclean, as that was the first option I tried to use.

As far as I could tell reading the manpage, there is no way to disable
this from the commandline, short of specifying a custom configuration
file (which requires passing SBUILD_CONFIG as an environment
variable... ?)

The situation in which I needed this was while traveling without
reliable network access (on a North American train), and I wanted to run
lintian and other hooks that required installing packages after the
build was finished, and I had a local caching proxy with all the
relevent packages available, but practically speaking no network, and
the Packages files may have been out of sync, so could not download them
from the caching proxy to then install the .deb packages... my sbuild
tarballs include the Packages files so that cases like this will work,
but this disclean feature works against me here. --no-apt-update got me
most of the way there, and I could actually build a package with
--no-run-lintian, but in order to install lintian and other packages, I
needed to tweak my ~/.sbuildrc with the above mentioned configuration.

I've set the version to the version where this issue first presumably
appeared, but also confirmed as best I could that this is not an option
in newer versions.


Thanks for maintaining sbuild!


live well,
  vagrant

#1135581#8
Date:
2026-06-26 06:45:48 UTC
From:
To:
Hello,

Bug #1135581 in sbuild reported by you has been fixed in the
Git repository and is awaiting an upload. You can see the commit
message below and you can check the diff of the fix at:

https://salsa.debian.org/debian/sbuild/-/commit/39db2c37ad3f8cf37df76d5bb279d8375c0a4565
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Add --apt-distclean commandline option

Closes: #1135581
------------------------------------------------------------------------

(this message was generated automatically)
-- 
Greetings

https://bugs.debian.org/1135581

#1135581#15
Date:
2026-06-27 10:19:24 UTC
From:
To:
We believe that the bug you reported is fixed in the latest version of
sbuild, which is due to be installed in the Debian FTP archive.

A summary of the changes between this version and the previous one is
attached.

Thank you for reporting the bug, which will now be closed.  If you
have further comments please address them to 1135581@bugs.debian.org,
and the maintainer will reopen the bug report if appropriate.

Debian distribution maintenance software
pp.
Jochen Sprickerhof <jspricke@debian.org> (supplier of updated sbuild package)

(This message was generated automatically at their request; if you
believe that there is a problem with it please contact the archive
administrators by mailing ftpmaster@ftp-master.debian.org)
Format: 1.8
Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2026 12:06:03 +0200
Source: sbuild
Architecture: source
Version: 0.91.10
Distribution: unstable
Urgency: medium
Maintainer: sbuild maintainers <sbuild@packages.debian.org>
Changed-By: Jochen Sprickerhof <jspricke@debian.org>
Closes: 1135581 1137071
Changes:
 sbuild (0.91.10) unstable; urgency=medium
 .
   [ Luca Boccassi ]
   * Install and use sysusers.d/tmpfiles.d config files
 .
   [ Arnaud Rebillout ]
   * Fix default value for UNSHARE_MMDEBSTRAP_EXTRA_ARGS (Closes: #1137071)
 .
   [ Tianyu Chen ]
   * Add ; for examples in sbuild.conf
 .
   [ Benjamin Drung ]
   * Map *-proposed pocket to base suite
   * Mark autopkgtests needing Internet access
   * Support chroot in /usr/bin (LP: #2133900)
 .
   [ Philippe SWARTVAGHER ]
   * Fix running autopkgtest with --extra-package=/dir/
 .
   [ Jochen Sprickerhof ]
   * Add --apt-distclean commandline option (Closes: #1135581)
   * Drop duplicated build dependency
   * Fix some groff warnings
   * Add d/clean
   * Deprecate the buildd package
   * Drop optional priority
   * Drop R³
   * Bump policy version (no changes)
 .
   [ Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues ]
   * man/sbuild.1.in: move the unshare backend docs to the top
Checksums-Sha1:
 d7fcffa20dac861bb691e8f12f6cdbc9bfc4dd56 2784 sbuild_0.91.10.dsc
 ea7975656031e2872b7d230076e99f3e2981f93b 265004 sbuild_0.91.10.tar.xz
Checksums-Sha256:
 76d465d831f3ea546675880d6ee0987b1e94362973370f0ed2912a3a7d77791c 2784 sbuild_0.91.10.dsc
 5568f5a87ece0669dfe3910e907ef63f0b75a3d7cab82e904e7ec97761ad8fb4 265004 sbuild_0.91.10.tar.xz
Files:
 8467f5143b9901d52e32bda1eaca1559 2784 devel optional sbuild_0.91.10.dsc
 6f60bf3c7ee4465fd9ce40f6b69d6797 265004 devel optional sbuild_0.91.10.tar.xz
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