[gentoo-catalyst] catalyst enhancement

[Ramon van Alteren]

Hi List,

We use catalyst to build our server install images for our serverpark,
we do so on a couple of servers and a couple of development laptops.
Sadly these are not all set up equally. Which makes editting and
developing specfiles a pain at times.

We would like to be able to specify the following in specfiles:

portage_confdir: portage/webserver

This would enable us to keep our specfiles in svn and check them out on
every host neccesary, as long as it has a valid catalyst.conf file
building stages should "Just Work (TM)". Currently it doesn't because
some of the vars in the specfiles need to be in absolute form to work.

I would like to suggest the following solution:

Introduction of a new variable in catalyst.conf:
relative_basepath="somepath"

Introduction of new code in catalyst to do the following:
detect usage of a relative path in the specfile vars (aka does it start
with a /) and add relative_base in front of the relative path.
If relative_base is not defined, default to / ( or maybe to catalyst.conf/share_dir ?)

This would affect the following vars in the specfiles:
portage_confdir, portage_overlay, pkgcache_path, kerncache_path,
fsscript, linuxrc (?), motd, root_overlay, xinitrc, kernel/<label>/config
We're mainly using stage4 specfiles, I had a quick look through the
other examples in catalyst but couldn't find any other likely
candidates, but if I'm missing any please let me know.

To be clear, I'm willing to do all the work to get this implemented, I
already hacked up our current catalyst-2.0.1 install to do just this.
It is however rather hackish and i would like to get this in the main
tree. The patch would be against current svn.

I'm curious about a number of things:

* Would this functionality be useful for more people on the list ?
* Would this patch ever stand a chance of getting integrated ?

Apart from that I'd appreciate any comments, caveats, critisism etc.

Grtz Ramon

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