Re: [gentoo-catalyst] [RFC] Summer of Code Proposal: GNAP Love

[Andrew Gaffney]

Philipp Riegger wrote:
> Good morning,
>
> I have some ideas for Summer of Code which i'd like to discuss with you.
>
> I'm mostly interested in making GNAP usable and my proposal includes
> lots of tasks in GNAP and catalyst, of which i'd like to finish as many
> as possible and do some research on the rest.
>
> catalyst tasks:
>
> • Squashfs snapshot support
> I don't like it, that it takes so much time to unpack a new snapshot and
> it takes so much disk space to store it. Plan is: distribute tree
> snapshots as squashfs images, mount them directly into the workdir,
> use /mnt/distfiles and /mnt/packages instead of snapshot subdirectories.

Eh, I've never found unpacking a new snapshot to be all that cumbersome. While 
it probably wouldn't take much to implement this, I don't like the idea. At 
least, I'd never use it, since it would remove the ability to poke around in the 
snapshot_cache.

> • (Squashfs seedstage support)
> Maybe the same is possible for stages? A future plan for this could be
> to mount the squashfs image directly and use unionfs for the real work,
> but i have no idea how deleting files in such a setup works. Research is
> necessary here.

This isn't really feasible.

> • uclibc-cross-compiling support
> Cross compiling is hard, but it should be possible to build arch-uclibc
> from arch. Research, what needs to be done combined with the
> implementation, if possible. This would also make GNAP more flexible.

If you want a uclibc stage, use a profile that has uclibc as the default 
virtual/libc provider.

> • Documentation
> In an email from some days ago i read, that documentation is planed for
> after the release. I could support this and proofread it, since i need
> the knowledge anyway.

It's planned for some time in the future when the people who have the knowledge 
to write the documentation find the time and motivation.

> • (Code cleanups)
> I write this everywhere, but since i need a basic understanding, i have
> to read (parts of) the source and maybe i find something worth
> improving.

Catalyst is definitely in need of code cleanups. However, that's just a result 
of a codebase that's changed hands multiple times over many years. We do random 
cleanups already as we encounter code that needs it.

> • Cross compiling research
> This is the continuation of the uclibc stuff with some plans on what
> could be done how.

Like I said on IRC, this is vapier's territory.

> • Non-root builds research
> Wouldn't it be nice if being root was not necessary for using catalyst?
> I would like to look into the possibilities there and what is needed to
> make it reality.

Mostly, this would require the ability to do "random" bind-mounts and chroot. 
The only "sane" way to do this is to make catalyst suid root.

-- 
Andrew Gaffney                                 http://dev.gentoo.org/~agaffney/
Gentoo Linux Developer             Catalyst/Installer + x86 release coordinator
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