[pbuilder-dist] overwrite OTHERMIRROR set in ~/.pbuilderrc

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

This works correctly in pbuilder in precise, it is just that the --othermirror option overrides ~/.pbuilderrc, and it seems this option was added by default since commit 1208 in lp:ubuntu-dev-tools (or somewhere around there).

I'm going to move this to ubuntu-dev-tools since that package has pbuilder-dist.

pbuilder-dist will respect an OTHERMIRROR variable from the environment, if you need to add a mirror. It sounds like you are working around LP: #371221, so we should rather just fix that.

Hello Stefano,

The bug status has been changed from Confirmed to Incomplete.

Is there any information you would like me to provide?

Aurélien

Oh, sorry, wrong bug. I thought it was another one about othermirror, where the proposed patch didn't do anything useful.

This one is mostly by design. I don't see any straightforward solution for it.

I guess another possibility would be to read pbuilderrc as well within pbuilder-dist? So if the environment var is not set, check whether it is set in pbuilderrc before then reading devscripts fallbacks.

please reopen if this problem still exists

This bug still exists in focal 20.04. It should not have been closed.

When using pbuilder-dist the value of OTHERMIRROR is ignored, as is the value of --othermirror passed as argument to pbuilder-dist.

To work around this I need to manually add a mirror to /etc/apt/sources.list from within a hook file, which is a bit of a hack and shouldn't be necessary.

Adding to my previous comment, I can also see that the documentation is wrong.

The page https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PbuilderHowto#Differences_with_pbuilder says that:

[QUOTE]
pbuilder-dist does apparently not yet support all kinds of operations. The following doesn't work correctly for example:

sudo pbuilder-dist eoan i386 update --override-config --othermirror "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/cae-team/ppa/ubuntu eoan main"

So if you want to add a repository, you will have to use "OTHERMIRROR" in ~/.pbuilderrc as follows:

OTHERMIRROR="deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/cae-team/ppa/ubuntu eoan main"
[/QUOTE]

But adding OTHERMIRROR to ~/.pbuilderrc has no effect, as was originally reported.

Basic tracing shows that this is still the case in focal (20.04).

My workaround has been to add a hook directory ~/.pbuilderrc by adding the line:
HOOKDIR="$HOME/.pbuilder-hooks/"

Then in $HOME/.pbuilder-hooks/ create a file D10addsource which contains the lines:
echo "deb [your-source-here]" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get update

However, if setting OTHERMIRROR inside of ~/.pbuilderrc worked as documented, then all I would have needed to do would be to add the following line to ~/.pbuilderrc and no hook required:
OTHERMIRROR="deb [your-source-here]"

If my workaround is wrong, please tell me.

So in summary, this bug still exists. If the bug is not going to be fixed, then at least the documentation needs to be updated.

This bug is somewhat related to https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-dev-tools/+bug/371221, because if packages from ~/pbuilder/dist_result could satisfy dependencies then I wouldn't need to use OTHERMIRROR. But really OTHERMIRROR should still work regardless.