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

[Fabian Groffen]

On 25-06-2008 12:25:57 -0700, Peter Abrahamsen wrote:
> Hi Fabian,
>
> On Jun 24, 2008, at 11:50 PM, Fabian Groffen wrote:
>> Portage is not designed to be "handed over" to anyone.  However, there
>> should be just one place in Portage itself where the user is set (this
>> pym/portage/const_autotool.py).  It may implicitly encode it in
>> installed packages, but this is due to the nature of those packages
>> that
>> do that themselves.
>
> Fair enough, but couldn't that script just set it to ${USER}? Is there
> something unsafe about that?

Uhm... well, if you would do that you:
a) would allow anyone to emerge/unmerge anything in your prefix
b) would get loads of permission denied errors lateron, since the files
   are still owned by you, not by random ${USER}

Could go and mess with permissions here, but then why not create a user
that everyone can sudo to or something.  Well, anyway, it's similar to
user A installing a package X, and user B wanting to update/remove X.

>> Maybe one of the two following things is interesting to you:
>> - binary packages
>>  Prefix Portage can install from binary packages made for "another"
>>  Prefix.  You could use them to get each developer to quickly get up
>> to
>>  speed, in their own Prefix installation.
>
> Actually, that's a really good idea, I hadn't thought of using binary
> packages with prefix.
>
> I'm in the process of moving management of our servers into puppet
> (http://puppet.reductivelabs.com/), which I'm also using to distribute
> our overlay. There's no reason our prefixed installs couldn't use this as
> well, allowing us to ensure that everyone has the right version of the
> core dependencies of our project (installed via binary package) without
> blowing away anything they might have going on.

"Our" binpackages on tinderbox.dev.gentoo.org (default-prefix dir) are
not too up-to-date, and mostly missing, but you can get an idea of how
it works.  If you point PORTAGE_BINHOST to the url (http is fine) 
`emerge -Kav` should do it (I may be wrong in the flags, have to look it
up).  Of course your own binhost can contain optimised packages (if you
know the systems) specific USE-flags, and just only what you need.  This
in combination with a prefix-macos-kick-start.dmg should be able to get
you up to speed in no-time.  (Disclaimer: not tested ;) )  The
prefix-macos-kick-start.dmg is on my todo/wish-list still.

> Thanks to all contributers for your work, it's really nice to be able to
> manage my OS X box with the tools I already know.

Thank you for using the work we put so much efforts in to make it rock.


-- 
Fabian Groffen
Gentoo on a different level
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