Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues <jo...@debian.org> writes: > in 2016 we filed our first DPKG_ROOT patch #824594 against > base-files. The dpkg version at the time just had included support for > the DPKG_ROOT variable being set for maintainer scripts and we were > excited to try out this new feature for creating foreign architecture > chroots. At the time we thought that no discussion on d-devel was > necessary before filing the bug because we knew only 10 source packages > had to add DPKG_ROOT to their maintainer scripts and because doing so > would not affect any normal installation.
[...] Thank you for this excellent write-up! This is exactly the type of fairly obscure Debian lore that, although it only affects a small number of packages, is worth documenting because it can be very difficult to understand otherwise why it's present or to debug problems caused by accidentally breaking it. I would therefore love to see this documented in Policy. The documentation doesn't have to be long, but even though this only affects a small handful of packages used during early bootstrapping, I think we should write it down somewhere official so that we have a record of what we're doing and how it's supposed to work (and what packages need to care about it). If possible, could you write up a brief description along those lines and open a bug against debian-policy with that description? We can then figure out where to put it in the document. Thanks! -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>