[gentoo-alt] [PREFIX] revolutions in the bootstrapping world

[Fabian Groffen]

All,

Over the past few days, I've changed lots in the bootstrapping
procedures itself, and mostly the bootstrap-prefix.sh script.

In short, I've completely changed my attitude towards education of the
users of Gentoo Prefix, and in fact put my knowledge in a script, for it
to revolve till eternity, hopefully making many bootstraps flawless.

Things I've changed:
- versioned targets no longer used
  Things like patch259 sometimes do still exist, but are no longer
  referenced.  Instead, the generic target (patch in this case) tries
  out in sequence a couple of versions, with hopefully one not failing.
  This has the advantage that we can add new versions, and if they break
  some platforms that's not necessarily an issue, while they might fix
  other platforms, from which we benefit then.
- downloading GNU targets is slightly smarter
  The code now loops over .tar.xz, .tar.gz and .tar to find the
  availability of a file.  If the host can't unpack one, it also
  continues to the next.  This can possibly be optimised by not trying
  to download e.g. the .xz first.  If the file cannot be found on the
  Gentoo mirrors, the script tries the official GNU mirrors instead.
- solaris bootstrap guide is now unix-like bootstrap guide
  The Solaris bootstrap guide now is de-solaris-ised.  It contains
  pointers for UNIX-like platforms, in detail at the moment for Solaris,
  FreeBSD and Mac OS X.  The guide isn't up to date at the moment, see
  auto-bootstraps below.
- the freebsd and macos bootstrap guides should go
  They are incorporated in the UNIX-like guide, so just maintenance
  overhead.
- introduced stage1, stage2 and stage3
  The stage1 meta function performs the initial steps of getting
  packages necessary to bootstrap the first Portage instance.  It does
  all but Portage itself.  stage2 downloads and unpacks a Portage tree,
  and then installs Portage and sets up a profile.  Finally, stage3 does
  everything up to and excluding the emerge -e system step.  This means,
  all the logic of emerging packages with/without deps and figuring out
  which packages exactly.  Note that all three stages can resume where
  they left off.  Care has been taken to detect if a certain task has
  already been done, to ease continuing the bootstrapping process in
  case of errors.
- introduced the interactive installer
  When ./bootstrap-prefix.sh is ran without arguments, it starts an
  interactive installer session.  It checks some things in your
  environment and asks you some questions about your bootstrap.  That
  is, it sets EPREFIX, PATH, MAKEOPTS, CHOST, runs stage1, stage2,
  stage3, emerge -e system and finally creates the startscript.

I hope this can ease bootstrapping for many of you, and resolve lots of
common problems.  I've successfully verified it to work in the past few
days on x86-solaris (10), x86-macos (Lion), x86-macos (Leopard),
x64-macos (Lion), and I've heard that x64-macos (Mountain Lion) also
worked.

The docs must be updated and cleaned up to advertise the new and
preferred option of following the interactive installer.


-- 
Fabian Groffen
Gentoo on a different level