Ed Howland wrote:
> The script (Perl) needs to be developed and tested on Linux, deployed
> on OSX. There is no way to test on the OSX server (don't have 2 of
> them)

This is where a VM would come in handy.  Are there VMs that can run an
OSX server as guest on a Linux host?  Parallels goes the other way
(linux on osx, x86 only) and neither VMware nor Xen support OS X, AFAIK.

> If I chroot, then I can simulate the OSX path system w/o disrupting my own.
> 
> Here is the sequence that needs to happen
> 
> 1. create/restore simulated OSX rooted filesystem from some media
> (file, ISO image etc.)
> 2. run setup/create script (w/some params) (the one that works now.)
> #  At this point more dirs and files will exist there and some files
> will have changed.
> run restore/uncreate script (w/same params)
> # at this point the simulated OSX filesystem should look exacly the
> same as it did after step 1
> 
> To check the above, I can compare it to the file or ISO image I built it from.

Possibly another way is to use an overlay (aka union) filesystem.  The
process would be something like this:

1) create original OS X filesystem
2) create blank filesystem image
3) mount blank filesystem image as union, overlaying OS X filesystem
4) chroot and run setup/create scripts
5) exit chrooted environment
6) unmount union filesystem
7) mount filesystem image via loopback
8) delete files in filesystem image
9) unmount filesystem image
10) repeat from 3

With an overlay, the underlying filesystem is untouched; changes only
happen to the overlay.

An apt-cache search for unionfs on Ubuntu shows a few hits.

OS X also support unionfs.  Here's a nice walk-through:

http://rentzsch.com/macosx/unionFilesystems

UnionFS is what Knoppix uses for its Persistent Disk Image.

Regards,
- Robert


 
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