revolutions in the bootstrapping world
 

All,

Over the past few days, I've changed lots in the bootstrapping
procedures itself, and mostly the bootstrap-prefix.sh script.

In short, I've completely changed my attitude towards education of the
users of Gentoo Prefix, and in fact put my knowledge in a script, for it
to revolve till eternity, hopefully making many bootstraps flawless.

Things I've changed:
- versioned targets no longer used
Things like patch259 sometimes do still exist, but are no longer
referenced. Instead, the generic target (patch in this case) tries
out in sequence a couple of versions, with hopefully one not failing.
This has the advantage that we can add new versions, and if they break
some platforms that's not necessarily an issue, while they might fix
other platforms, from which we benefit then.
- downloading GNU targets is slightly smarter
The code now loops over .tar.xz, .tar.gz and .tar to find the
availability of a file. If the host can't unpack one, it also
continues to the next. This can possibly be optimised by not trying
to download e.g. the .xz first. If the file cannot be found on the
Gentoo mirrors, the script tries the official GNU mirrors instead.
- solaris bootstrap guide is now unix-like bootstrap guide
The Solaris bootstrap guide now is de-solaris-ised. It contains
pointers for UNIX-like platforms, in detail at the moment for Solaris,
FreeBSD and Mac OS X. The guide isn't up to date at the moment, see
auto-bootstraps below.
- the freebsd and macos bootstrap guides should go
They are incorporated in the UNIX-like guide, so just maintenance
overhead.
- introduced stage1, stage2 and stage3
The stage1 meta function performs the initial steps of getting
packages necessary to bootstrap the first Portage instance. It does
all but Portage itself. stage2 downloads and unpacks a Portage tree,
and then installs Portage and sets up a profile. Finally, stage3 does
everything up to and excluding the emerge -e system step. This means,
all the logic of emerging packages with/without deps and figuring out
which packages exactly. Note that all three stages can resume where
they left off. Care has been taken to detect if a certain task has
already been done, to ease continuing the bootstrapping process in
case of errors.
- introduced the interactive installer
When ./bootstrap-prefix.sh is ran without arguments, it starts an
interactive installer session. It checks some things in your
environment and asks you some questions about your bootstrap. That
is, it sets EPREFIX, PATH, MAKEOPTS, CHOST, runs stage1, stage2,
stage3, emerge -e system and finally creates the startscript.

I hope this can ease bootstrapping for many of you, and resolve lots of
common problems. I've successfully verified it to work in the past few
days on x86-solaris (10), x86-macos (Lion), x86-macos (Leopard),
x64-macos (Lion), and I've heard that x64-macos (Mountain Lion) also
worked.

The docs must be updated and cleaned up to advertise the new and
preferred option of following the interactive installer.


--
Fabian Groffen
Gentoo on a different level

revolutions in the bootstrapping world
 

Fabian Groffen <grobian@gentoo.org> writes:

> In short, I've completely changed my attitude towards education of the
> users of Gentoo Prefix, and in fact put my knowledge in a script, for it
> to revolve till eternity, hopefully making many bootstraps flawless.

haha, in short, Fabian has surrendered to the users.

revolutions in the bootstrapping world
 

On 13-08-2012 08:59:58 +0200, Fabian Groffen wrote:
> I hope this can ease bootstrapping for many of you, and resolve lots of
> common problems. I've successfully verified it to work in the past few
> days on x86-solaris (10), x86-macos (Lion), x86-macos (Leopard),
> x64-macos (Lion), and I've heard that x64-macos (Mountain Lion) also
> worked.

I've now also confirmed it successful on x64-macos (Leopard) and
ppc-macos (Leopard). I've fixed yesterday sparc-solaris (10), and I'm
still waiting for a fix to be proven correct for sparc64-solaris (10).
The Solaris bits were perl not finding libdirs. I'm confident we can
crack it. I hope today I will solve it, so I can bump the snapshot
tomorrow.

> The docs must be updated and cleaned up to advertise the new and
> preferred option of following the interactive installer.

Any suggestions for the installer are welcome. At the moment:
- instructions for resuming (you can rerun the installer with the same
input when a failure occurred in stage1, stage2 or stage3, emerge -e
system stage you need emerge --resume, and manually create the
startscript)
- sort-of auto-resuming, more likely "perform" mode, where the inputs
required by the installer are given, e.g. ./bootstrap-prefix.sh
perform CHOST=... EPREFIX=... MAKEOPTS=... PATH=...
- also specify -l next to -j in MAKEOPTS, because it seems the
unbeatable formula sometimes appears to be too aggressive


--
Fabian Groffen
Gentoo on a different level

revolutions in the bootstrapping world
 

On 16-08-2012 09:56:49 +0200, Fabian Groffen wrote:
> I've now also confirmed it successful on x64-macos (Leopard) and
> ppc-macos (Leopard). I've fixed yesterday sparc-solaris (10), and I'm
> still waiting for a fix to be proven correct for sparc64-solaris (10).
> The Solaris bits were perl not finding libdirs. I'm confident we can
> crack it. I hope today I will solve it, so I can bump the snapshot
> tomorrow.

Now also fixed for OpenIndiana (Solaris 11-ish) 32-bits.


--
Fabian Groffen
Gentoo on a different level

revolutions in the bootstrapping world
 

On 13/08/12 07:59, Fabian Groffen wrote:

All,

Over the past few days, I've changed lots in the bootstrapping
procedures itself, and mostly the bootstrap-prefix.sh script.

In short, I've completely changed my attitude towards education of the
users of Gentoo Prefix, and in fact put my knowledge in a script, for it
to revolve till eternity, hopefully making many bootstraps flawless.



Good news. I'm glad we'll continue to see Gentoo Prefix become better
and easier to use, allowing people everywhere who are boxed in by
over-zealous sysadmins to escape into the glorious free world of
automated package management!


--
Regards,
Asfand Yar Qazi
Team 87 - High Throughput Gene Targeting
Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute



--
The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is operated by Genome Research
Limited, a charity registered in England with number 1021457 and a
company registered in England with number 2742969, whose registered
office is 215 Euston Road, London, NW1 2BE.

revolutions in the bootstrapping world
 

On 13-08-2012 08:59:58 +0200, Fabian Groffen wrote:
> The docs must be updated and cleaned up to advertise the new and
> preferred option of following the interactive installer.

Just finished committing this. In an hour or so this should be
available on the web rotation.


--
Fabian Groffen
Gentoo on a different level