[rleigh]

sbuild is at least 25 years old, it might be nearer to 30 at this point. I did a lot of cleanup of it during the mid-2000s, including adding the schroot support to it which is being removed here, and that included abstracting virtualisation backends which allowed newer solutions to replace it. The original had to run as root to do a chroot(2) call, and it reused the same environment between builds. schroot removed the need to run as root, and it could provide a clean snapshot for each build. But it too is now rather dated--though the replacement tools often lack some of the features it has, like being able to build from ZFS cloned snapshots or Btrfs snapshots, or even LVM snapshots. We wanted it to be fast as well as safe, and the time-to-build and time-to-clean-up using these was and is excellent.

Replacing key infrastructure is hard, particularly when it's working well and the cost of replacement is high, especially so when it's volunteer effort. It was cutting edge back when Perl was all the rage, but while Perl might no longer be the fashionable choice, tools written in Perl continue to work just as they always have. I found it dense and impenetrable even 20 years back, and I used to have the whole thing printed out on fan-fold paper from a dot matrix; it was about 3/4" thick and covered in annotations! Understanding several thousand lines of obscure regexes is a cautionary tale in how to write unmaintainable Perl, and was one of the motivations to clean it up, refactor it into meaningful functions, and document what it was doing so that it could be maintained with a little less effort.