Gentoo Archives: gentoo-alt

From: Nathan <nathan.stocks@×××××.com>
To: gentoo-alt@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-alt] [PREFIX] Binary packages experimentation
Date: Wed, 10 Oct 2007 18:52:09
Message-Id: 96c9d6a80710101142p64fed3fx7f03205445d25c9b@mail.gmail.com
In Reply to: [gentoo-alt] [PREFIX] Binary packages experimentation by Fabian Groffen
1 Interesting stuff.
2
3 So, I've dropped out of testing prefix things for...what...a year?
4 How are things going? Is there a place that interested parties (new
5 users or new-old users like me) can get up to speed on the project
6 status? Has it yet reached a quasi-stable stage?
7
8 ~ Nathan
9
10
11 On 10/10/07, Fabian Groffen <grobian@g.o> wrote:
12 > (Sending all this to the ML, because I have the impression that leaving
13 > it all in an IRC channel means it goes > /dev/null, whereas probably
14 > more people read the ML. IMO we should use the ML more often.)
15 >
16 > Yesterday I started on the creation of binary packages in my ppc-macos
17 > install. For this I rebootstrapped with a long prefix, I will shortly
18 > explain why.
19 >
20 > I want to try to use these binary packages to aid bootstrapping, and to
21 > make things like obtaining ghc easier. (Compiling ghc can only be done
22 > if you already have a ghc installed ... :( ) Thanks to the Portage
23 > devs, Portage has some binhost stuff built-in which should allow you to
24 > easily retrieve packages from an external website. The net-result would
25 > be to just only once compile gcc (if you care enough about it), instead
26 > of at least twice, as it is now.
27 >
28 > Thanks to patrick (bonsaikitten @irc.freenode.net) we got some gigs of
29 > storage on a server with a decent (fast) internet connection, which soon
30 > is supposed to pop up as prefix.gentooexperimental.org.
31 > While it sounds like this is a Gentoo thing, unfortunately it is not.
32 > However, it is the only way for now to try this stuff out, as binary
33 > packages require quite some storage/bandwidth which Gentoo Infra doesn't
34 > have for us. If these binary packages work out, hopefully eventually we
35 > will be able to have our stuff on Gentoo hosted infrastructure.
36 >
37 >
38 > As for the binary packages; Gentoo Prefix Portage (tm) is equipped with
39 > a small (but horribly ugly) hack to transform a binary package from
40 > prefix A into prefix B. It effectively changes all occurrences of A
41 > into B in such a way that this also works in binary code. Some padding
42 > is applied to make sure the file-offsets are kept the same. However,
43 > this means that a package can never be changed to work in a prefix that
44 > is as string longer than the prefix that it was made with. For this
45 > reason I am bootstrapping in a ridiculously long prefix (106 chars) such
46 > that most people will be able to use these packages, because most people
47 > have a simple prefix, like /Users/you/Gentoo.
48 >
49 >
50 > --
51 > Fabian Groffen
52 > Gentoo on a different level
53 > --
54 > gentoo-alt@g.o mailing list
55 >
56 >
57 --
58 gentoo-alt@g.o mailing list

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-alt] [PREFIX] Binary packages experimentation Fabian Groffen <grobian@g.o>