Prepareapt considered harmful...

[Henning Sprang]

I I am in regular occurences wasting time resolving troubles caused by 
this line of code in subroutines-linux, in the prepareapt task:

     [ -d $FAI_ETC_DIR/apt ] && cp -r $FAI_ETC_DIR/apt/* $FAI_ROOT/etc/apt/

it overwrites, hidden from the user, without logging this action, the 
stuff in /apt with whatever there is in the nfsroot - if the user wants 
this or not.

It's only for the simplest cases that we can assume a user wants the 
same sources.list in the client as on the fai server/nfsroot.

For example I have desktop and testing systems, that must use completely 
different repositories than servers. Not to talk about different debian 
releases or Ubuntu.

Recent versions of debootstrap put a correct sources.list into the base 
chroot, so there's no need to out that stuff right.

And, last but not least - the USER, not the FAI developers must plan the 
installation - and a plan also includes to think about and make sure the 
right apt repo is uses.
Here we only get in the way with this planning, and especially with the 
execution of the plan if we copy over the nfsroot stuff whatever is 
there already.

Is there a good argument why this line must be kept there?
If not, please let's remove it!

I rather propose something like

fcopy -ri /etc/apt

in a the hook updatebase.DEFAULT in the simple examples. This gives the 
user the files *he defines*, not the ones *we think might be needed* - 
and it even sets the right sources list on softupdate, where prepareapt 
isn't even run.
(BTW: why? I'd rather think, from the meaning of the words, "prepareapt" 
must run always, and updatebase only on fresh installations - but it's 
the othr way round!)


Henning