I was trying to dist-upgrade chroot'd environment. I created configuration
file with:

RootDir "/tmp/mychroot";

and pointed APT_CONFIG to it.
Then I ran:

# export APT_CONFIG
# apt-get update
# apt-get dist-upgrade

apt-get dist-upgrade failed after downloading packages as it was not able to
extract templates. Many errors were reported saying:
E: Could not open file /var/cache/apt/archives/<package> - open (2: No such file or directory)
E: Unable to determine the file size - fstat (9: Bad file descriptor)
E: Read error - read (9: Bad file descriptor)

It suggests, that apt-extracttemplates (and maybe other components) does not
honor RootDir option. The packages were downloaded to the chroot'd environment,
but apt-extracttemplated looked them up in the primary environment.

I was able to workaround this with setting:
Dpkg::Chroot-Directory "/tmp/mychroot";

in the APT_CONFIG file. However, this caused dpkg to be chrooted to /tmp/mychroot/tmp/mychroot,
which obviously does not exist.

The only possible workaround seems to be to chroot whole 'apt-get dist-upgrade'.
# chroot /tmp/mychroot apt-get dist-upgrade

We will need to check if this applies to APT/wheezy and/or APT/unstable.

It could be that rev 1561.1.206 solves this:

apt (0.8.12) unstable; urgency=low
…
  * apt-pkg/contrib/fileutl.cc, apt-pkg/deb/dpkgpm.cc:
    - honor Dpkg::Chroot-Directory in the RunScripts*() methods
…
 -- Michael Vogt <mvo@debian.org>  Thu, 10 Mar 2011 14:46:48 +0100

as apt-extracttemplate is not directly executed from APT.

I remember that we had some changes in that area as well, I just can't
seem to find them just yet.


Would be nice if you could test this in wheezy as I never used these options
myself so far so I don't know the "usecase" to properly test it.


Best regards

David Kalnischkies

Hi David,
I've given it a try on wheezy (apt 0.9.7.6).
I suppose, the new apt-get chroots into the new env before
apt-extracttemplates is executed, right?
Setting just RootDir made apt-extracttemplates complain about missing
APT_CONFIG configuration - which is obvious as it was stored in the
parent environment.
(APT_CONFIG points to my temporary configuration file which is stored in
/tmp. It contains the necessary tweaks and is not part of usual
configuration.)
However, it passed. And then chroot was done (probably once again)
before /usr/bin/dpkg. And there is failed with status 100.

Setting RootDir along with Dpkg::Chroot-directory makes no good. It
makes apt-get chroot into RootDir/chroot-directory (like
/tmp/altroot/tmp/altroot).
Needless to say that /usr/bin/apt-listchanges could have not been
started from there and failed with status 100.

With the recent dpkg::chroot-directory changes you probably mean bug#
659387. I saw that but I don't think it applies to this case.

Best regards,
Milan Cermak

Dne 25.11.2012 14:07, David Kalnischkies napsal(a):