apport-chroot

apport-chroot - Create and use chroots for apport retracing

apport-chroot [ options ] create release chrootpath apport-chroot [ options ] retrace crashid
apport-chroot [ options ] retrace reportfile apport-chroot [ options ] upgrade chroot
apport-chroot [ options ] upgrade all apport-chroot [ options ] installdeb chroot debpath [ debpath ... ] apport-chroot [ options ] login chroot

Introduction

apport-chroot is a tool to create, update, and manage chroots for using apport-retrace for several distributions and releases without needing to touch the installed system at all. It uses fakeroot and fakechroot, so that the entire reprocessing of apport reports which get submitted to the crash database can happen on a system where you do not have any root privileges or special packages installed. Chroots can either be kept as a normal directory, or be stored as a compressed tarball. In the latter case, the tarballs are temporarily unpacked when using them. While unpacking takes a certain amount of time, this is well compensated by not having to purge packages after installing them for retracing, and being sure not to destroy the chroot on failed upgrades, buggy maintainer scripts, etc. This also allows you to use a chroot for several tasks in parallel.

Installation

If fakeroot or fakechroot themselves are not installed, you can just put the libraries anywhere and set the environment variables APPORT_LIBFAKEROOT and APPORT_LIBFAKECHROOT to the full path of libfakeroot.so and libfakechroot.so. If the distribution packages are installed, they will be found and used automatically.

Creating chroots

The create mode is mostly a wrapper around debootstrap which does the grunt work of actually creating a basic chroot. apport-chroot then does some additional modifications:

* Install some additional packages like apport-retrace and gpgv (as well as extra packages specified with -p)

* Optionally set up additional apt sources (with -a)

* Adapt the apt sources.list if you use a file:// mirror

* Disable daemons with a policy-rc.d

* Clean up the apt package cache

The only two required arguments are the release name (passed to debootstrap), and the target path (a directory, or the path to a .tar.gz tarball). For the reasons stated above, you usually want to supply --tar and some additional apt sources with -a.

Using chroots for retracing

In retrace mode, apport-chroot selects and prepares a chroot for the crash to reprocess and calls apport-retrace in the chroot with the crash file. Most of the options regarding retracing are passed to apport-retrace, with making sure to properly handle file references by symlinking them into the chroot. In this mode you need to specify a "chroot map" which maps distribution names and release versions to chroot paths. Please see the documentation of -m/--chroot-map below for details. If you want to enable duplicate checking, you need to specify the path to the duplicate database. Please see --duplicate-db below for details.

Maintaining chroots

The most common maintenance operation is upgrade which takes a chroot path as argument, or a DistroRelease: name if a chroot map is specified. If all is specified as chroot name, all chroots in the chroot map are upgraded. To install a set of externally provided .deb packages into the chroot, you can use the installdeb mode. This will temporarily copy the debs into the chroot and install them with dpkg. The login mode will provide a shell in the chroot which can be used for general maintenance. If you use tarball chroots, you need to decide whether you want to keep the changes after logging out (specify --save) or throw them away (default). In --save mode, you can still throw away the changes if you log out with a nonzero exit code, i. e. by doing exit 1.

--mirror=URL

-p package, --extra-package=package

-a source, --apt-source=source

-t, --tar

--save

-m MAP, --chroot-map=MAP

{ "Ubuntu 7.04": "chroots/feisty.tar.gz", "Debian 3.1": "chroots/sarge.tar.gz",
}

-v, --verbose

--auth=authfile

--duplicate-db=dbfile

--confirm-attach

-h, --help

apport and the accompanying tools are developed by Martin Pitt <martin.pitt@ubuntu.com>.