dpkg_status does not add transitive dependencies

[glindstedt]

Currently there is no transitive dependency resolution of the packages that you provide to the dpkg_status rule. This causes apt to complain about missing dependencies and thinking that the install is broken. It might be possible to work around with a custom rule to resolve transitive deps of the top level packages you want to have installed before passing to dpkg_status, but it feels like this should be default behavior.

[thesayyn]

These are still pre-1.0 rules, I am not surprised it is not doing the right thing. This is not a priority for us, but we are happy to accept PRs.

I'd imagine an aspect walking up the tree would do the trick.

[glindstedt]

I might be wrong as I haven't used aspects much, but I think an aspect won't quite cut it currently since the :control targets only point to the control files of the current package and are separate from the normal dependency tree, so there's no graph to traverse:
https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/rules_distroless/blob/main/apt/private/index.bzl#L38

How about making a new rule with a control attribute and e.g. ControlInfo provider instead of using filegroup for the main target?

deb_package(
    name = "{target_name}",
    control = ":control",
    srcs = [
        {deps}
    ] + [":data"]
)

[alexeagle]

It seems to me that https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/rules_distroless/blob/main/examples/debian_snapshot/BUILD.bazel#L74 is just wishing for a load("@bullseye//:defs.bzl", "ALL_PACKAGES") symbol to be generated, that would include transitives as well.

[alexnovak]

Could we add an additional rule in the template that contains the control for a given package, and its dependencies in a filegroup? I'm not sure if this would have any disadvantages compared to a ControlInfo provider.

[thesayyn]

As of #115 we automatically create a dpkg_status target for every apt.install at the repository root (@bullseye//:dpkg_status) which contains all the packages.