[gentoo-catalyst] Updating deployed stage4 servers

[Daniel van Ham Colchete]

Hi yall again!

I've made a stage4 11 months ago for some servers, and this stage4 is simply
amazing! It really works. Tuesday I had to reinstall a server and I did it
really quickly. Them I'm using the tinderbox target to generate packages
with security upgrades and cfengine to deploy it. Everything works but there
are a few cases where I start thinking whether doing the right way.

The big question I want to make here is: what is the right way to maintain
(upgrade) a stage4?

Right now I use tinderbox. But, it will not generate a seed for the next
tinderbox. If I upgrade something like wvstreams from 4.2 to 4.4, the next
tinderbox will not know that, because it's using the very first stage4 as
seed. My solution was, after building everything, open the stage4, update it
manually, close the stage4 with a new name and use it as your seed. A very
manual process.

The second problem is that if something is linked to libwvstreams-4.2.so I
will not know, so things can get really messy. The solution here is to build
the tinderbox, open the stage4, install the updates and run revdep-rebuild
inside the chroot. Keep the resulted package list, close the updated stage4
to another name. Use this updated stage4 as the seed to a second tinderbox
target witch will rebuild the affected packages. I never did it, but it
seems to be a way to go. There is a chance that will have a big loop here.
Again, very manual process, very very error prone, I would like to avoid.

What I noticed is that here on this list there are a lot of people using
catalyst to build and maintain a customized version of Gentoo too! What are
you people doing? How are you doing kernel upgrades? What about kernel
dependand packages (fuse, etc...).

How should I use the tool to make better use of it?

Thank you very much!

Best regards,
Daniel Colchete