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

[Paul Mattal]

Allan McRae wrote:
> 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.

Hmm. It seems my trouble starts in that I'm using a linode as my x86_64 
box, and the linode kernel doesn't have aufs2 in it. I typically use 
that for all my x86_64 builds.

I should have another fast x86_64 build box at my disposal soon. My 
laptop is still running i686, which I sometimes still need for some 
things. Can I switch *just* to the x86_64 kernel but leave the rest 
i686? Then I could use it to build both. This somehow seems like a bad 
idea, but maybe that's just because I'm too tired at the moment to think 
through all the possible bad things that could happen.

- P