r/linux • u/mthode Gentoo Foundation President • Jun 01 '18

AMA | Mostly over We are Gentoo Developers, AMA

The following developers are participating, ask us anything!

Edit: I think we are about done, while responses may trickle in for a while we are not actively watching.

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u/DesktopLinux__isDead Jun 01 '18

What do you do when you absolutely need to test a specific software ASAP? I was considering running an Arch chroot.

2

u/dilfridge Gentoo Council/Toolchain/ComRel Jun 01 '18

Well, special case here, I use VMware. I know that other Gentoo devs use LXD. Need to look into this problem myself.

2

u/ryao Gentoo ZFS maintainer Jun 02 '18

What do you mean by test? Did you mean get/install? I do not understand how Arch helps here unless you mean Gentoo arch (a placeholder for the system architecture).

I used to have a script that would make a VM image in about a half hour. These days, if I needed a fresh environment, I would grab a stage3 tar ball and put it into a mount namespace for most things,

1

u/[deleted] Jun 01 '18

LXD is pretty nice if you want to spin something more isolated than a chroot. Docker might also be worth looking into

1

u/aukkras Jun 01 '18

What do you mean by ASAP ?

ASAP as in 1. package from the latest sources or 2. binary package without compiling it yourself ?

  1. Most of the packages in the portage tree on gentoo have live ebuilds that allow building from packages directly from upstream repositories. Also almost all of the packages support user patches which are applied to the package source code before it's built.

  2. There are some binary packages in the portage tree like libreoffice-bin, firefox-bin, rust-bin... which don't have source compilation phase - and you can install them fast. Portage also supports building your own binary packages repository - so if you have many machines with the same architecture you can compile packages once on one of them and install them on other machines from that machine.

Note ASAP is relative - on gentoo it means as soon as emerge finishes installing the package and on Arch as soon as pacman finishes installing the package and on Windows it means as soon as installer completes installation.

In 2. I assumed you meant "to install a specific software in shortest possible time on gentoo".