Re: [gentoo-alt] prefix: Keeping old version of portage tree

[Jacob Godserv]

The broader subject you're touching on - reproducable Gentoo installations
- is a problem that Gentoo has attempted to solve with catalyst, and Funtoo
with metro. They're both barely documented and extraordinarily difficult to
work with, because they solve a huge number of problems in one go.

You may find that what you're after is a bit harder than you anticipated.

To kick things off, though, I can tell you that keeping a consistent
portage tree is extremely simple. Just preserve the /usr/portage directory.
However, this isn't useful without portage itself, and keeping that locked
to a version means you're going to have to capture the process Gentoo
Prefix uses to bootstrap a new prefix installation, and inject your own
source tarballs (instead of the ones that get downloaded by the script).

Some other lurkers here on the mailing list may be able to offer you more
comprehensive advice, but I thought I'd at least give you what I know while
you wait.


On Tue, Jul 15, 2014 at 2:19 PM, Anders Bo Rasmussen <abr@×××××××.com>
wrote:

> Hi again.
>
> Today I did some more experiments with Gentoo Prefix and I must say
> that I think it looks very good. Basically I just compiled some
> different programs ending with gvim, testing that it ran on servers
> with different Linux distributions and as different users - and it all
> worked :)
>
>
> The only problem I had was that I need to figure out more about the
> package system if I want to figure out why I can't have the gtk use
> flag enabled when I emerge gvim. But that is a minor problem I will
> look into later.
>
>
> What I want to use Gentoo Prefix for is to make a toolchain for
> compiling a software project (and at the same time also make a lot of
> programs available on different servers). My basic idea is to have a
> script that makes a new version of my Gentoo Prefix installation each
> time I run it, so it could be placed e.g. at
> /<somewhere_global_available>/gentoo-<date>. This script or small set
> of scripts should contain which packages to emerge, changes to
> make.conf, package.use and other changes that is needed to make an
> installation. And of course the scripts will be in a VCS. The software
> project will just point to the version it currently uses at
> /<somewhere_global_available>/gentoo-<date>. This way old versions of
> the software project can be compiled without problems, as all the
> tools will be the same version.
>
> What concerns me is that I think I should only update the Portage Tree
> when I need it. With the method described above I'll get a new version
> of the Portage Tree each time. That means that I'll not get the same
> installation if I run my script with 2 weeks in between, which I don't
> like, as I then can't fix small problems without changing everything.
>
> Any ideas on how I somehow gets the same portage tree or another way
> to solve this problem?
> And I guess I should also store the source files somewhere and not get
> them downloaded, so I don't risk an old version is suddenly not
> available anymore - is there a way to do that?
>
> Regards
>  Anders Bo Rasmussen
>
>


-- 
    Jacob