[Bug 1947810] Re: autopkgtest-satdep.deb unpack fails on Debian images

[Athos Ribeiro]

I rebased the patch on the newest version and filed a new MP at [1].

The package is available in a PPA at [2].

When I first prepared this patch, I stumbled upon [3], where there was
some resistance in hard coding a compression format upstream due to the
technical debt it could cause. Specially when we would want to revert
the change once [4] is accepted. Still, I am submitting it there as
suggested [5].

I ran the dep8 test suite locally, here is the result summary:

On a note for my future self, when reviewing this bug I started
wondering (for the second time) why we are only seeing this in Debian an
not in older Ubuntu releases. The reason is because zstd support was
back-ported all the way down to xenial.

[1] https://code.launchpad.net/~athos-ribeiro/ubuntu/+source/autopkgtest/+git/autopkgtest/+merge/412406
[2] https://launchpad.net/~athos-ribeiro/+archive/ubuntu/autopkgtest-use-xz/+packages
[3] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=883167
[4] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=892664
[5] https://salsa.debian.org/ci-team/autopkgtest/-/merge_requests/133


** Bug watch added: Debian Bug tracker #883167
   https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=883167

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1947810

Title:
  autopkgtest-satdep.deb unpack fails on Debian images

Status in autopkgtest package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  Since impish, dpkg defaults to the zstd compression format for
  compressing the members in a deb package archive [1,2].

  However Debian zstd support efforts are still in progress [3].

  Therefore, running autopkgtest from an Ubuntu (>= 21.10) host on a
  Debian target fails, since autopkgtest uses dpkg-deb to generate the
  autopkgtest-satdep.deb package.

  For instance, running the following commands for a given package

  $ autopkgtest-build-lxd images:debian/sid
  $ autopkgtest ./. -- lxd autopkgtest/debian/sid/amd64

  results in the following error:

  autopkgtest [18:32:17]: build needed for binaries
  autopkgtest [18:32:24]: ERROR: "dpkg --unpack /tmp/autopkgtest.4vFMyL/1-autopkgtest-satdep.deb" failed with stderr "dpkg-deb: error: archive '/tmp/autopkgtest.4vFMyL/1-autopkgtest-satdep.deb' uses unknown compression for member 'control.tar.zst', giving up
  dpkg: error processing archive /tmp/autopkgtest.4vFMyL/1-autopkgtest-satdep.deb (--unpack):
   dpkg-deb --control subprocess returned error exit status 2
  Errors were encountered while processing:
   /tmp/autopkgtest.4vFMyL/1-autopkgtest-satdep.deb

  [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/dpkg/+bug/1923845
  [2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/dpkg/+bug/1923845/comments/34
  [3] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=892664

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