Re: status of Knoppix as build platform

Just now Bill Immerman made 15 LEDs in my apartment flash with this:
> The newest version of Knoppix (V3.3-2003-11-03) uses glibc 2.3.2 & gcc 
> 3.3.2) so it seemed a good time to re-try building HEAD under it. Got quite 
> far; it broke at python, 

That's excellent.  If you could provide the error messages from the
end of that build, it would help a lot.

> meaning that it got through a lot of core 
> packages, including glibc, gcc, perl, and the kernel.

No.  gcc, glibc, XFree86, and perl are the big major-headache packages
that have succeeded by the time you get to python.  The kernel is near
the end, and furthermore, it's pretty easy to make it do what we need
it to do.

> From the website, it appears that it is not yet expected that
> building HEAD will succeed up to an iso, is this true? If what I got
> to is par for building HEAD, then this might be a convenience for
> those wanting to try/keep up with HEAD development. Doesn't need a
> chroot.

I've updated versions.html.  Recently, we've been able to make HEAD
work on certain platforms.  The goal, of course, is to make HEAD a lot
more robust than STABLE ever was, and buildable on a wide variety of
distributions and versions.  It's currently working consistently on
Debian sarge.

> My only preparations were:
>   -- checkout HEAD on system with garchive and do a fresh make garchive
>   -- make /var/www/{garchive, garpkg} on running Knoppix system

Making /var/www/garpkg isn't necessary unless you intend to build
garpkgs, which is something that we're not really even doing yet.

>   -- nfs mount garchive on /var/www/garchive

Be careful with NFS.  Make can sometimes choke on the subtle
differences between NFS and POSIX filesystem semantics.  It's probably
ok for the garchive, though.

>   -- mount enough writeable storage on Knoppix read/write ( > 5.5 gig; I 
> actually mounted with options dev, suid, in case I needed to do chroot on 
> this storage ... otherwise you can't create device nodes ... previous 
> Knoppix (V3.2) succesfully builds STABLE in chroot, but this is important 
> trick)
>   -- move /tmp aside and symlink /tmp to a directory on the writeable 
> storage; make build and gar subdirectories there (otherwise, may run out of 
> tmp space duing build)
>   -- checkout gar (HEAD) on writeable storage and build as usual
>   -- I didn't do this but will try next time: setup environment for ccache 
> so it uses area on writeable storage instead of knoppix user's home (which 
> is in ram, therefore has little space for cache)

-- 
--< ((\))< >----< [email protected] >----< http://www.movealong.org/ >--
pub  1024D/05A058E0 2002-03-07 Nate Riffe (06-Mar-2002) <[email protected]>
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