[gentoo-user] Re: Question about making a tarball

[Nikos Chantziaras]

Dale wrote:
> Nikos Chantziaras wrote:
>> Dale wrote:
>>> I try to keep a "up to date" stage 4 tarball here in my system just in
>>> case.  I basically did the creation just like I would if I were booted
>>> from the CD.  I created /mnt/gentoo/ on my system, extracted a stage 3
>>> there, then chroot in and create a stage 4 tarball.  I have one weird
>>> thing tho that has me confused.  When it creates the stage 4 tarball, it
>>> is in /mnt/gentoo.  Today I unpacked the stage 4 so that I could update
>>> it and when I do a tar xjpf stage4 -C /mnt/gentoo, it actually looks
>>> like this, /mnt/gentoo/mnt/gentoo/ which is not what I am looking
>>> for. It doesn't matter on a running system, but it would if I were
>>> trying to
>>> rescue myself.
>>>
>>> How do I tell tar when I am making the tarball to look at /mnt/gentoo/
>>> as it start point, root directory if you will?  I read the man page but
>>> suspect I am missing it somewhere.  There has to be a way since it is
>>> done that way for the stage 3 tarball.
>> You strip the leading directory during extraction using the
>> "--strip=1" option ("1" means "strip 1 leading directory", which will
>> ignore "gentoo/" during extraction.)
>>
>>
>>
>
> OK.  That makes sense, sort of.  How do the people that make the stage3
> tarball do it?  When I extract a stage3 tarball, it doesn't have
> /mnt/gentoo on it at all.  Are they using a "dedicated" install to build
> those tarballs on?
>
> Also, since I want it to ignore /mnt/gentoo, wouldn't I have to use
> --strip=2 to remove both /mnt and the /gentoo after that?  Just trying
> to make sure I understand this correctly.
>
> I would like to do this on the creating part if possible.

To do this on creation, you can do use "-C /mnt/gentoo ." as options 
(translate: package the current directory of /mnt/gentoo).  The 
top-level directory of the tarball will then be "./".