On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 1:07 AM, Allan McRae <allan@archlinux.org> wrote:
Aaron Griffin wrote:
On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 10:20 PM, Allan McRae <allan@archlinux.org> wrote:
Hi,
It has come to my attention that some people are not building packages in a clean chroot and others are managing the chroots themselves so I wrote a brief wiki entry on the scripts provided in devtools to do this [1]. Any comments on how to improve it would be appreciated. I have not added a section on using these tools to build i686 packages on x86_64 as I have not attempted that, so if someone could try that out and add it to the page, that would be appreciated.
[1]
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/DeveloperWiki:Building_in_a_Clean_Chroot
Great writeup Allan. I had been meaning to do this for some time.
The only thing I can think of would be a mention that this does use unionfs to maintain the clean chroot, so all changes made while building, and all deps installed (as depends or makedepends) are never installed to the actual chroot itself. So no matter what, the chroot is always clean (though the <chrootdir>/rw dir may become dirty.
I don't know if you'd phrase that better than I. It's always good to see docs written by someone who did not make the tools themselves. It helps clear things up.
I will add some clarification along these lines to the page.
When I was running the 64bit build server, I actually had one main chroot at /var/archroot/ and symlinked that in /etc/skel/<chrootdir>/root. This way all users on the system shared one global chroot, which was updated by a cron job ever hour or so.
Additionally, I never tested this with 32bit chroots on a 64bit system. I *think* it might just be a matter of running things with "linux32", but I'm not too sure.
Having a comp for each arch, I have never tried any of this out so be prepared for the potentially stupid question that follows... Is that the "linux32" from util-linux-ng? Because I notice there is a linux64 in that package too. So can I build x86_64 packages on my i686 using that (given my processor supports x86_64)? I guess I might need a non-standard kernel to do that...
Not sure, exactly. It'd be nice to have a way to cross-compile packages, though. I had been meaning to look into it.