Re: [gentoo-catalyst] Keeping a test environment using catalyst

[Chris Gianelloni]

On Tue, 2005-05-10 at 16:56 -0400, Paul Smith wrote:
> %% Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2@g.o> writes:
>
>   cg> Do what catalyst does.  Bind mount it.
>
> Yes, that would work for /usr/portage, but I'm still missing all the
> emerge, etc. commands.

You should have these during the livecd-stage* builds, as portage is not
unmerged.

>   >> How do you all develop and test live CDs?  Is there some trick to
>   >> getting a test image available?  Or, do you do development via another
>   >> method and only start using catalyst when everything pretty much works?
>
>   cg> Honestly, I've been doing catalyst development (and use) long
>   cg> enough that I pretty much know what to expect.  When something
>   cg> doesn't work, I rebuild the entire image each time.  The reason
>   cg> for this is simple.  I do not want to do *any* manual steps
>   cg> outside of catalyst, since it'll do nothing but give you trouble
>   cg> in the long run.
>
> This is good if you're just debugging catalyst itself, but I've got a
> whole set of steps such as creating and debugging some ebuilds,
> configuring things, creating rc scripts to do some stuff, etc. etc.
>
> Obviously at the end it needs to build and boot correctly "from scratch"
> but doing it from scratch for every incremental change is pretty slow.

We don't do any shortcuts simply because we *are* the catalyst
developers.  When we find shortcomings in catalyst, we fix them.  ;]

> If there are no fancy tricks that I'm missing I'm sure I can come up
> with some myself :-).

Like I said before, I'm not sure I really follow what you're trying to
do.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead/QA Manager
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux