[Tails-dev] Heads up: update your build environment

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Author: intrigeri
Date:  
To: tails-dev
Subject: [Tails-dev] Heads up: update your build environment
Hi,

tl;dr:

  * If you are maintaining your Tails build VM manually, please
    upgrade your Tails build VM to Wheezy, and install our custom
    live-build package as documented on
    https://tails.boum.org/contribute/build/#manual


  * Else, if you're using Vagrant, or care about it, please upgrade
    our Vagrant basebox (#7218). I *might* do it myself in a few weeks
    or months, as a way to make it easy to contribute to Tails with
    code, but you should absolutely *not* rely on it. Volunteers?


    Note that even if nobody wants to upgrade the basebox to Wheezy,
    given Squeeze's LTS support will likely be done in a different
    archive than the usual Debian one, the basebox will definitely
    need to be updated when Squeeze reaches EOL, that is in a few
    weeks. So, perhaps rebuilding it on Wheezy is not that much more
    work (yeah, I know, last time we had to update the basebox, I went
    with the easy way of updating it in-place, which might not be an
    option for the Wheezy upgrade; but maybe it is :)



And now, the long version.

Last month, I have put quite some time into migrating our build system
to live-build 3.x (#5691). I stopped when I got an ISO to build (but
not boot). It was a long and painful process. I was hit by a few bugs
or limitations (that I'll report upstream when I come back to it, if
ever), and I found little new features to marvel at. My conclusion is
that it may be worth it to migrate to live-build 3.x at some point,
mainly to ease collaboration with other Debian Live systems, and maybe
to ease the migration Jessie, but (a) it's definitely too late to do
so in time for Tails 1.1; and (b) the migration cost is clearly way
too high compared to the immediate benefits. Bad news, it seems that
the migration to live-build 4.x won't be much easier (and there's time
for many things to change again until Jessie is released).

So, as a (at least) short-term solution, I've worked on #7217 ("Build
environment compatible with Wheezy") today, and have reached a state
that I find relatively satisfying, at least for the time being.
Ugly hack warning.

* I've prepared a package of Squeeze's live-build, that we've been
using for years, but with a version number that is bigger than
Wheezy live-build's one. So, it can be installed on Wheezy, and is
not affected by the "Breaks: live-build (<< 3.0~a26-1)" relationship
that was added to the initscripts package during the Wheezy
development cycle. We now have a live-build Git repo, BTW. And I had
to add another "special" APT suite ('builder-wheezy') to our
reprepro configuration.

* I've updated the manual build setup documentation. It now tells to
install Wheezy, and our live-build package.

* I've updated the tails::builder Puppet class, that does basically
the same as the manual setup documentation.

* I've upgraded our Jenkins builder to Wheezy, thanks to the
aforementioned Puppet class.

=> I've marked #7217 as resolved.

Cheers,
--
intrigeri
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