# from imacat
# on Sunday 07 September 2008 12:52:

>> On Wed, Sep 03, 2008 at 03:00:40PM +0300, Gabor Szabo wrote:
>> This requires the tester to have the infrastructure in place to
>> clean up afterwards - probably by running in a VM (which itself
>> limits testing to
>
>    I believe there is "chroot".

Possibly with a stackable (overlay/copy-on-write) filesystem:

  http://www.unionfs.org/
  http://aufs.sourceforge.net/

That means you can run a bunch of stuff and then just wipe out the 
changes from the overlay point.  I've played with unionfs on debian 
etch and I think it would do everything you need (possibly even from 
within a chroot) unless your needs involve a few particular things with 
nfs, which is where the aufs "new hotness" comes in.

There's also LVM snapshots, right?  I haven't tried that, but my 
understanding is that unionfs/aufs would provide more transparency into 
what had changed during the install, which seems useful for debugging.

And of course, 'checkinstall', but that messes with the innards in 
userland such that the "brain in a jar" abstraction tends to leak.

--Eric
-- 
Speak softly and carry a big carrot.
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