Re: [gentoo-alt] Portability of Prefixed installs?

[Peter Abrahamsen]

Hey,

On Jun 24, 2008, at 3:54 PM, Jeremy Olexa wrote:
> Hi, It is great to hear that Gentoo Prefix works for you in a
> corporate setting! Mind if I poll you about how many workstations your
> distribute your Gentoo Prefix 'image' to?

We have I guess five Mac laptops and two Minis that mount a DMG at  
login. It's not quite 'corporate' yet -- we're just a web startup, and  
infrastructure is still fairly ad-hoc.

Actually, on my mini I copied the contents over to /gentoo (since my  
root filesystem is case-sensitive, unlike others'), hence the question  
about re-basing. I've set EPREFIX, and from a quick test that looks  
like it works great, thanks Jeremy and Fabian.

> So you want to avoid having your devs dealing with system management
> yet allow them to customize the install? Is that right? I imagine
> deploying a NFS mounted 'image' may be easier and allow the sys-admins
> (you) to update the prefix when you want to. However, I do know that
> grobian has worked on a "stage4" type install that allow you to
> 'transplant' prefixes much like you are describing. I will let him
> comment on that. Sorry I am of not much help at the moment.

Right. I thought about the NFS thing, or else rsync. We often work on  
laptops away from the office, so NFS over our VPN probably wouldn't be  
a lot of fun. We went with the DMG because macs have case-insensitive  
filesystems by default, so a disk image seemed safer.

I think we could all be using the same install pretty easily, except  
that sometimes a developer needs to experiment with a library they're  
considering using, and it's convenient to be able to install that with  
gem (and hence into the prefix).

Is there some kind of roadmap somewhere for the Gentoo prefix? Like,  
what are the major things being worked on now, and how much work  
remains before we could think about merging into mainline?

Thanks all,
Peter
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