[WBEL-devel] Observations on the failure of chroot building

[John Morris]

Still don't know for sure what went wrong with the build environment but
can speak about some of the things discovered so far.

1.  Chroot building seems to work perfectly to mask the build arch, as
in building i386 packages on an x86_64 machine.

2.  Chroot does not hide everything and the devil lives in the details. 
Said supernatural being bit hard when I upgraded my machine from FC2 to
WBEL4.  FC2 seems to be a happy medium, as it allows most (hwcrypto
looks at the running kernel version) WBEL3 packages to correctly build
and WBEL4 was entirely built with FC2 as the 'real' os and no problem
with it has yet to be traced to the build environment.

WBEL4 blows everything up.  Not due to a flaw in WBEL4, but the presence
of udevd for example causes several WBEL3 packages to blow chunks during
installs or attempts to rebuild.  The version of rpm in WBEL4 won't
install WBEL3 packages into a fresh chroot, a multitude of packages fail
on the post install script.

The longterm effects of these discoveries are that building at home
isn't practical.  Not only would all that rebooting get annoying while
working at home, doing it remote would be asking for trouble, especially
now that I'm not the only one using bob.  Forgeting to check and
triggering a remote reboot while the Mrs. is surfing wouldn't exactly
contribute to domestic tranquility.  :)  So building is going to have to
move to a library host.  Bob will probably be the one to hatch the
backlog expect a new name on packages after that.

Figure on continuing to use chroot trees just to be able to quickly blow
one up and recreate it and at least only need a reboot between WBEL3 and
4 instead of WBEL3-i386, WBEL3-x86_64, WBEL4-i386 and WBEL4-x86_64.

It would be majorly cool if RH would support loading older versions into
Xen containers when they add Xen to FC5 and later RHEL5 but I'm not
counting on it.  Guess I could have also bought a newer VMWare but
really am trying to cut the cord when it comes to dependence on
proprietary software other than games.

-- 
John M.      http://www.beau.org/~jmorris     This post is 100% M$Free!
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