On Thu, 2007-03-29 at 17:33 +0000, Nelson Batalha wrote:
> The ideal would be to have total control of the emerge step therefore easily 
> avoiding circular dependencies, emerge blocks of packages at a time, easily 
> find and remove unnecessary packages, etc. Well, at least as easy as in our 
> system.

No.  The ideal is to have a perfectly working snapshot with no errors in
it.  ;]

> I conclude from
> 
> >It does take Release Engineering upwards of a month to stabilize any
> >given snapshot to build a release.  Maybe there's a reason for that.  ;]
> 
> 
> this is a problem for everyone, so there is no current way to go around it 
> is there? (actual question, not rhetoric :P)

Yes and no.  We take a given snapshot and modify it to suit our needs.

> Wouldn't it be great if you could just get in and do this small step 
> yourself as an option? One could always do this only to obtain a bunch of 
> built packages and -then- do a clean build right?

No.

Gentoo releases *must* build 100% with *no* caches and *no* manual
intervention with the release snapshot.  There are no exceptions.
Because Release Engineering has 0 need for the functionality you've
asked for, it isn't likely it would ever be included.

> So my question is, how do you build the release cd's? You do try and error 
> on ebuilds like I do, and write portage overlays? Would it be bad if you 
> could enter the cd and manually emerge stuff yourself, solving problems at 
> the moment instead of building all over again everytime portage complains? 

No.  We modify the snapshot.  We do massive amounts of testing.

That's pretty much it.

> Is there a problem with the current catalyst implementation that would make 
> this hard to code?

Hard?  Not necessarily.

I just don't feel like doing it since it's nothing we would ever use.
Catalyst *is* first and foremost Gentoo's release-building tool.

> >Making it "easy", and thereby encouraging people, to poke around in the 
> >caches is the absolute last thing I want to do.
> 
> Ok instead of calling it --chroot, call it --pretend. Everything a user did 
> would be erased. No problems with touching the ccas (it forces a clean 
> build) and one could still build pkg's and "play" with emerge.

We don't *want* people building packages.  We don't *want* people
touching *anything* within the catalyst build.  The goal is 100%
non-interactive.  Anything else is a bug and the *bug* needs to be
fixed, not worked around.

> Phew :). I understand you must be full of work with the new release, reply 
> anytime, and thanks for the help.

I'm replying from a "Chili's" in the George Bush International Airport
in Houston, Texas as I'm on my way to California for a job interview.
You can't say I'm not dedicated... :P

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering Strategic Lead
Alpha/AMD64/x86 Architecture Teams
Games Developer/Council Member/Foundation Trustee
Gentoo Foundation

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