Fedora "Extras" for RHEL -- WAS: Fedora and the System Administrator

[Stephen C. Tweedie]

Hi,

On Fri, 2003-10-03 at 21:11, Bryan J. Smith wrote:

> > What you really need isn't a distribution, it's a buildroot. 
> > Something you can chroot into to build packages that would work
> > in that distribution.  No point in having separate OS installations
> > for every case.
> 
> [ TheBS sees a beam of light ... ahhh ... ]
> 
> Hmmm, that's not quite where I was going, but it made me think of something 
> else.  Maybe you should ship UML in RHEL and encourage Fedora to accomodate the 
> few details to make sure it works with it.  I'm not an UML guru, but this 
> sounds like a possible solution (provided you have the extra memory/resources 
> so your system can handle it)?

Just using "chroot" should be enough.  I've got distributions back as
far as 5.2 on my local build box and can chroot into any one of those at
any time.  

And with "mount --bind", I've got scripts which will copy existing mount
points such as /proc, /home/sct and /usr/src/redhat/BUILD into the
chroot environment, so all the files I'm working on remain accessible
there.  I still have a need every so often to build stuff that can't be
built on anything more recent than RHL 7.2, so this technique gets
exercised regularly here.

UML has a performance overhead that chroot largely avoids (as long as
you've got enough physical memory to keep both the chroot distro and
your main desktop in memory at once.)

Cheers,
 Stephen