[gentoo-soc] Gentoo Anaconda – the new Gentoo Installer #1

[wiktor w brodlo]

Dear Gentooers,

I'm wiktor and I'm working on the new Gentoo Installer, based on
Fedora's Anaconda. The installer is meant for easy installation of
Gentoo from the LiveDVD.
Sabayon is a Gentoo-based distro that uses Anaconda as their installer.

So far I have managed to install Anaconda on Gentoo and have decided –
against my original proposal – that I will use Sabayon's Anaconda, not
the original Fedora. The reason is that after some further analysis I
believe that there are some changes that would need to be made to the
Fedora installer for it to install a Gentoo distribution and Sabayon
have already implemented some (why repeat the work already done?).
Additionally, all the dependencies required to build and run Anaconda
are readily available through Portage and Sabayon's overlay, and
Sabayon have an ebuild for Anaconda in their overlay.

There is a problem with Sabayon's ebuild/package, however. It builds
an internal version of audit and libselinux, both packages available
in Portage. This is against good practices and Gentoo rules on QA, and
another thing that I will need to address before release. In order to
keep modifications to my proposal as least-invasive as possible, I
have decided to put solving this issue in the second semester.

I have had some problems with both the ebuild and the build itself,
and I've spent a large chunk of time on working on the original Fedora
codebase before I have decided to switch to Sabayon's, so
unfortunately I am a few days behind the schedule, but I don't think
it's a big issue as my schedule was build around the assumption that I
don't work as hard as I can. Of course being late this early isn't
that great, but I hope it will turn out for the best in the long run,
as Sabayon's code is much easier to work on, and it saves the trouble
of making it install on Gentoo.

~ wiktor.