Mailing List Archive

chroot maddness
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Lots of people want a separate gentoo on their osx machines, hidden away
in a /gentoo type directory. While I personally don't see the need for
such things, I can understand the desire for such an installation.
Unfortunately, portage is not yet repaired for handle such an install.
So here's my thought: if portage can't install into an alternate root,
why not make portage *think* it's installing into root?

I propose a solution similar to the faketoo [1] environment presented
originally on the forums about 6 moths ago. We install portage and it's
entire environment into a separate directory, chroot to that directory,
and let portage obliviously go to town. This does not fix portage, but
I think it provides something useful for developers: an chroot testing
environment from which we can test packages and effectively develop a
working (though not self-booting) testbed for building gentoo/darwin.
As I understand it, we would be able to build a gnu userland running on
the darwin kernel.

Caveats:
- - I don't know crap about Libc vs. glibc. This could cause us some
headaches.
- - Do we build this using the existing gentoo packages or do we make
ebuilds for all of the darwin stuff? Does it matter?
- - The device structure. I think we can mount it in a dev inside out
chroot, but I'm not sure.
- - chroot wrapper scripts. There are some docs about forcing users to
log into a chroot, I simply haven't read any of them yet. Portage, as a
minimum, will need to be constrained.
- - Plenty more I haven't thought of.

What do you guys think? Am I crazy? Is this as useful for development
as I think it would be? I spoke with kito about this on irc yesterday.
~ I'll post the log for reference as soon as I get the chance and reply
to this thread with a link.

[1] http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_Faketoo

- -Nick
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