Show HN: Red Hat/CentOS chroot installer | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Red Hat/CentOS chroot installer

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19 pointsdozzie16 comments

I was seriously involved only in debian packaging, so could someone tell me - how did RH do consistent package building without this tool? I constantly see people making silly mistakes when they package without pbuilder.

A bit old but basically still valid for the most part: http://opensource.com/life/11/7/free-sake-story-koji

Using "mock".

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Projects/Mock

Koji, mentioned in the sibling comment, is built on top of it.

yum itself can already install to chroots, so a tool like this shouldn't be necessary on yum-based distributions.

https://plus.google.com/+LennartPoetteringTheOneAndOnly/post...

http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2009/03/05/fedora-equivalent-of-de...

Yup, this tool is completely unnecessary and overengineered. With yum it's a single command to install in a chroot (yum --installroot ...).

FYI: https://github.com/libguestfs/febootstrap

Yes, I've seen it. In old version (2.x) it could only install Fedora, in never version (3+, called supermin) it doesn't install chroot environments.

Try supermin 5, which has chroot support. How to use it is documented on this page (search for "chroot"). supermin 5 is widely available in Linux distros.

http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2014/03/08/supermin-version-5/#con...

Does this utility require you to actually install the base system (with yum and all) to the target, or can you install only the requested packages with their dependencies? This is fairly important distinction when making minimal containers.

No, you don't need to install Yum, it's just defined in default suites. You'll also need to disable fix_rpmdb.py postinstall script, which is necessary to make Yum runnable from inside chroot.

On the other hand, almost anything you would want to install will pull glibc, which is big package. But I suppose you could prepare trimmed down alternative and put it in additional repository. Seems doable.

FWIW Rinse is still maintained, under new owners.

I stopped maintaining it myself, along with xen-tools, a couple of years ago, but both projects have new owners and are active.

Thank you for comment. I need to update README to reflect reality.

There used to be an rpmbootstrap-like tool for using on Xen RPM-based guests, though it was never as reliable as debootstrap in my experience.

Nicely done, I'll have to try it.

I suspect you're talking about rinse, which I wrote alongside xen-tools.

It is still alive and well, under new maintainers:

http://collab-maint.alioth.debian.org/rinse/

how does this compare to 'rinse'?

* Easier to add packages to installation list (no need to track dependencies manually).

* Allows multiple Yum repositories to be specified and used during bootstrapping.

* RPM signatures checking.

* Doesn't depend on repository mirror to list directory contents, so it makes less work with the mirror setup.

* RPM spec already included, so yumbootstrap installs under Red Hat/CentOS.

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