[gentoo-soc] Gentoaster - Week 3/4/5/6 rollup progress report

[Liam McLoughlin]

Hey,

I know I've not done one of these in several weeks, I've not had much
progress due to exams and a week out of the country. However, I'm now
back and going full steam ahead until the end of GSoC on this project
and currently ahead of schedule. I'm just going to rollup all the
changes I've made since I last reported into this report. Here's a
rundown of what I've been doing in the past four weeks:

- Moved Stage3 and Portage snapshot downloads over to my own server
and fixed the logic for downloading/extracting these
- Added configuration file loading, you can now create an INI form
config to define how the VM should be built (here's an example of how
these work: http://pastebin.com/XyjrrAQx)
- Added an option to use a prebuilt kernel and modules to speed up the
build (using this a lot during testing runs, reduces minimal image
build time to around 1 minute on a MBP)
- Added package.use/package.accept_keywords configuration support
- Added custom package list configuration support so you can add
anything to your VM from the config
- Created system for allowing for different output formats, currently
raw, VMWare and VirtualBox disk formats are supported
- Included some example configurations

So at this point, the VM build tool is pretty much done. I'm now
moving on to the build daemon. For this, I'm using a project my mentor
suggested, Gearman. This should make the queueing and dispatching of
build processes a cinch. So here's the plan for this week:

- Improve isolation on the VM build tool, chroot jail each build process
- Setup Gearman on my development machine
- Build Gearman worker
- Build Gearman client
- Test both of these together with the example configurations and make
sure they work as expected

The amount of time I expect the daemon to take has reduced
significantly from that I planned in my original proposal due to the
use of Gearman, and so I expect to finish rather earlier than planned.
The daemon should be finished by next week, and then I'll move onto
the WebUI which I expect to take a few weeks. Once a work in progress
version of that is ready to show, I'll see if I can setup a copy you
can use to try it out. It'll probably be missing polish and features,
but it should allow you to try out Gentoaster without downloading
anything. I'll need to find hardware to run that, but I think I might
be able to source a beefy server for it for public use.

Cheers,
Liam