From: Gregory (Grisha) Trubetskoy (grisha_at_ispol.com)
Date: Wed 04 May 2005 - 15:33:46 BST
On Tue, 3 May 2005, Sam Vilain wrote:
> Bootstrapping Images
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> The status of debootstrap and `rpmstrap' in the current utilities was
> briefly discussed, so that vservers of lots of different types could
> easily be built without installing extra utilities manually.
I haven't seen this being discussed on the list, I hope I'm not about to
say anything sacreligious, but am I in the minority to think that the
build tools do not belong in util-vserver at all?
I think that util-vserver should provide the absolute minimal build
capability as proof-of-concept tucked away somehwehre in an examples/
subdirectory _only_. The job of writing/maintaining build tools belongs
with distribution maintainers (or whoever else wants to take it up).
When I set out to write what is now known as OpenVPS (which ATM is Fedora
based), I wanted to use util-vserver as much as possible, but in the end
found that since you ultimately end up having to figure out the intricate
details of the underlying mechanism (rpm in my case), it ends up being
easier to interface with rpm directly rather than via util-vserver
scripts. They served as a pretty good example and a starting point, and
that's about all the value I got from them. (We're actually more and more
relying on Python bindings for a lot of rpm and vserver calls)
Granted, there is an apparent chicken-and-egg problem here - linux vserver
needs to be easy to use to gain more traction and that requires build
images, and distribution maintainers are not going to take on complex
tasks like this without there being sufficient "coolness". But I think a
lot more can be done through advocacy and solicitation rather than
actually trying to do it.
I also think more effort was put towards bringing core utilities towards
mint condition (with man pages and everything) would go a lot further
towards overall value for the project than focusing on build tools.
Am I being off my nut here? (If so, that's OK, been there before!)
Grisha
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