[arch-dev-public] Punishment needed for not building in a chroot

[Allan McRae]

Paul Mattal wrote:
> Giovanni Scafora wrote:
>> 2009/12/6, Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org>:
>>>  It is as simple as mkarchroot to make the chroot and makechrootpkg 
>>> to build
>>> the package (providing the path to the chroot as an arguement).
>>>
>>>  Making a chroot for the opposite architecture is slightly more 
>>> difficult,
>>> but I can provide patches if needed.
>>
>> mkarchroot to make the chroot and makechrootpkg to build is very sample.
>> I think that patches are not necessary...
> 
> I agree that it's pretty simple, but not simple enough to have removed 
> the barrier to everyone doing it. So why not make it easier and get rid 
> of more of the mystery?
> 
> Let's start at the beginning, with the recommended command for creating 
> chroots:
> 
> sudo mkarchroot -C <pacman.conf> -M <makepkg.conf> <chrootdir>/root base 
> base-devel sudo
> 
> For starters, I have to trust mkarchroot pretty well not to have any 
> bugs, because I'm sudoing it. 

I'll never understand why people are more scared about their root 
filesystem being damaged when you can easily recover that using pacman. 
  All our db-scripts could destroy your /home/<user> data which is much 
more difficult to recover from backups but I bet you never second guess 
them.

> Then I need to find the pacman.conf and  makepkg.conf. 

That is optional.  But most people want to keep their makepkg.conf for 
the PACKAGER variable and MAKEFLAGS.

>Then there's the chrootdir/root--- now do I create that 
> first or not? How much of it? 

No idea...  my guess is that "mkdir -p" is used, but I have always 
created <chrootdir>/

>Who's going to own the stuff in there? 

It is a system chroot, so files are owned by whoever owns the 
corresponding files in the packages your are installing.

> What stuff will it put in there? Where will it keep the differencing 
> data for the unionfs partition (so I can be sure to have enough disk 
> around)?

Everything is in <chrootdir>.  <chrootdir>/rw for the difference data 
and the union is created in <chrootdir>/union

> Then I should decide-- if I have i686 and x86_64 boxes, is it better to 
> do all my builds on 1 machine, or on separate boxes? Can I build i686 on 
> x86_64? Can I build x86_64 on i686? If I'm going to set all this up, I'm 
> probably going to set it up on several machines-- how can I do that easily?

Up to you...   I build for x86_64 and i686 on my i686 comp (running 
x86_64 kernel).  I know many people build for i686 on x86_64.  I used to 
have a separate build machine for x86_64.  All combinations can work.

> I'm not saying people can't/won't/shouldn't do this. I'm saying it's not 
> a particularly kept-simple part of a distro that prides itself on 
> keeping things simple. People will do it if they trust it and it's 
> simple and elegant, just like the rest of Arch.

In all honesty, I rarely ever create a new chroot but that is definitely 
the most difficult part of the lot. You should only need to create a 
chroot once.  My workflow goes:

update chroot:
sudo mkarchroot -u /home/stable-i686/root/

build package:
sudo makechrootpkg -c -r /home/stable-i686/

Done.  Alias them to "mar" and "mcp" and possibly add them to the 
NOPASSWD section of your sudoers file and the process will become even 
simpler...


For soname bumps it is slightly more complicated.
build package with library bump and install in rw layer:
sudo makechrootpkg -c -r /home/stable-i686/ -- -i

then, build next package against new library from installed package:
sudo makechrootpkg -r /home/stable-i686/


The creation of the chroot could be simpler, but I'm not sure we can 
make the building steps much simpler without removing the flexibility of 
the tools.

Allan