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Charles Duffy wrote: |
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> Thank you for your advice. It's good to hear that someone else is in a |
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> similar scenario. |
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It's likewise nice to hear someone is planning the same as we do. |
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> The only thing that's going to be a hard sell around here is Catalyst |
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> -- our senior sysadmin (who is a considerably more seasoned Gentoo |
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> user than myself) has taken the position that using Catalyst is |
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> unnecessary and that emerge (targeting a chroot, with appropriate |
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> FEATURES set to generate binary packages) should be adequate. He's not |
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> immovable on such things -- but I'll need to have a very solid |
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> understanding of the benefits of using Catalyst before arguing any |
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> case to the contrary. (I've also contacted the author of |
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> gentoo-buildhoster to find out why he abandoned it, what he's using in |
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> its place, and whether he believes the project to be worth picking up; |
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> if he believes catalyst-2 to be more suitable for his use cases, |
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> understanding the reasoning behind that decision may provide some |
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> powerful arguments). |
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Well, basically he's right. Catalyst is a build tool that wraps all the |
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stuff you need to do when building packages in a chroot, with some |
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additional features |
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You don't need it.... it just saves time and a lot of work writing your |
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own scripts to manage the environment, and it's semi-maintained. |
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|
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OTOH you lose flexibility, need to invest time in learning how catalyst |
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works etc. |
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Catalyst-1 is completely unusable for building system-images, this is a |
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feature that catalyst gained with the -2 release. |
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Catalyst has gained quite a community of users by now, who keep bugging |
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Chris for features and explaination, you can find them on gentoo-catalyst. |
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|
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The benefit of using catalyst for us is that it solves two wishes in one |
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fell swoop: |
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* an automated and repeatable system image build tool |
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* a binary package generator for specified system images |
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|
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Additionally we're looking into using the tinderbox target to validate |
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builds on top of our different server images. |
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> Much of your other advice (ie. quickstart) is completely in line with |
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> our preexisting plans; thanks again for answering. (As for some of the |
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> items you're curious about -- such as our staff-to-server ratio -- I'm |
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> not entirely comfortable discussing all of that on an archived list; |
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> perhaps on IRC). |
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OK, that's cool, we've been thinking of generalizing the changes we did |
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to quickstart to get it to talk to our inventory system and submitting |
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them back to agaffney. |
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If somebody finds the time to do the work, that is. I would be very |
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curious about the inventory system you are planning, if you're willing |
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to shed some light on that I'd be grateful. |
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|
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Ramon |
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|
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-- |
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