[arch-general] difference between arch-nspawn and mkarchroot?

[Jan Alexander Steffens]

On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 11:55 PM, David C. Rankin
<drankinatty at suddenlinkmail.com> wrote:
> Devs,
>
>   DeveloperWiki:Building_in_a_Clean_Chroot notes that updating the chroot is now
> done by:
>
>   arch-nspawn $CHROOT/root pacman -Syu
>
> instead of
>
>   mkarchroot -u $CHROOT/root
>
>   Checking the help for both files I note (1) the -u option is dropped from
> mkarchroot, and (2) the help output for both arch-nspawn and mkarchroot are
> identical. So what is the difference between the two?
>
> --
> David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.

In the process of reorganizing the code, mkarchroot was split into two
binaries with complementing functionality.

arch-nspawn is a thin wrapper around systemd-nspawn, doing some
pacman-specific stuff like copying config from the host and binding
the cache.

mkarchroot (which now just builds the chroot instead of also providing
chrooting functionality) makes use of arch-nspawn, as do makechrootpkg
and archbuild.