Charles Duffy wrote:
Thank you for your advice. It's good to hear that someone else is in a
similar scenario.
It's likewise nice to hear someone is planning the same as we do.
The only thing that's going to be a hard sell around here is Catalyst
-- our senior sysadmin (who is a considerably more seasoned Gentoo
user than myself) has taken the position that using Catalyst is
unnecessary and that emerge (targeting a chroot, with appropriate
FEATURES set to generate binary packages) should be adequate. He's not
immovable on such things -- but I'll need to have a very solid
understanding of the benefits of using Catalyst before arguing any
case to the contrary. (I've also contacted the author of
gentoo-buildhoster to find out why he abandoned it, what he's using in
its place, and whether he believes the project to be worth picking up;
if he believes catalyst-2 to be more suitable for his use cases,
understanding the reasoning behind that decision may provide some
powerful arguments).
Well, basically he's right. Catalyst is a build tool that wraps all the
stuff you need to do when building packages in a chroot, with some
additional features
You don't need it.... it just saves time and a lot of work writing your
own scripts to manage the environment, and it's semi-maintained.
OTOH you lose flexibility, need to invest time in learning how catalyst
works etc.
Catalyst-1 is completely unusable for building system-images, this is a
feature that catalyst gained with the -2 release.
Catalyst has gained quite a community of users by now, who keep bugging
Chris for features and explaination, you can find them on gentoo-catalyst.
The benefit of using catalyst for us is that it solves two wishes in one
fell swoop:
* an automated and repeatable system image build tool
* a binary package generator for specified system images
Additionally we're looking into using the tinderbox target to validate
builds on top of our different server images.
Much of your other advice (ie. quickstart) is completely in line with
our preexisting plans; thanks again for answering. (As for some of the
items you're curious about -- such as our staff-to-server ratio -- I'm
not entirely comfortable discussing all of that on an archived list;
perhaps on IRC).
OK, that's cool, we've been thinking of generalizing the changes we did
to quickstart to get it to talk to our inventory system and submitting
them back to agaffney.
If somebody finds the time to do the work, that is. I would be very
curious about the inventory system you are planning, if you're willing
to shed some light on that I'd be grateful.
Ramon
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