On Friday, 22 September 2023 18:23:46 CEST Nicholas D Steeves wrote:
:) Well, you figured it out enough to get work done, which is something that some people have complained is too hard! Yes, by default sbuild uses "schroot", which takes care of the creation and destruction of clean chroots, with session management, since 2005.
About a decade ago, I was using pbuilder which still seemed like the default choice. Of course, all of this is just tooling around chroot, as are my own tools for having local distribution installations. I do think packaging is too hard. gbp does provide some automation for common tasks, but it needs to be used in precisely the right way or it can get in the way. And getting up to speed with the right way is not as obvious as it might be.
If you prefer real containers or a fully virtualised build machine (with LXC), gbp can also uses these. I prefer schroots, because they don't eat into the RAM as much as real containers of VMs ;)
Virtual machines and containers have their uses but are arguably excessive in many respects, and Debian's tooling works well enough with chroots, anyway. A lot of this seems so much better than what users of the Red Hat derivatives seem to put up with. Steady progress is being made, and I intend to contact debian-www and to file ITP tickets for the different packages involved. That will surely awaken groups who have an interest in certain packages. Thanks once again for the encouragement! Regards, Paul P.S. I should ask whether there is a way of pruning chroots under /run/schroot that seem to be created but not removed.