Compartmentalizing development builds

[Steve Feehan]

On Sat, Jul 16, 2005 at 11:40:13PM -0400, Stephen R Laniel wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 16, 2005 at 11:26:34PM -0400, Steve Feehan wrote:
> > chroot and cdebootstrap?
> 
> Can you elaborate? I'm familiar with the idea of chroot,
> though I've never really used it. Presumably in this context
> you mean that I'd make some directory for, say, Firefox
> (maybe ~/firefox), then install with that as the root. So
> then files would go into, say, ~/firefox/usr/lib/firefox and
> so forth. Is that the idea?

Yep, pretty much.

> I'm not familiar with cdebootstrap. Can you elaborate on how
> I'd use that in this context?

cdebootstrap is a tool for installing a debian system from
w/in a running debian...err...ubuntu system. Actually, I think 
it will work from other distros as well... say, if you want to 
run a chroot'd ubuntu system from w/in fedora.

# mkdir /chroot/dir
# cdebootstrap breezy /chroot/dir
# chroot /chroot/dir /usr/bin/env -i TERM=$TERM /bin/bash --login

Now you're in the chroot environment. You can install/build 
packages w/out touching your host system.

> Ideally, after all of this is done, I'd be able to do
> something like 'apt-get remove firefox-hoary' or
> 'apt-get remove firefox-breezy' and APT would know what I
> mean. If I tried to 'apt-get remove firefox', I'd get some
> nice error telling me, "You have to choose which version of
> firefox to uninstall." Will the cdebootstrap approach buy me
> that kind of cleanliness?

Not exactly. But it's totally separate from the host system, so
it's "clean" in that respect.

-- 
Steve Feehan