Hello James,

I do not know if it is useful for what you're trying to achieve, but using
catalyst for few years now, I encountered this problem a dozen times
already.

I never found a proper/elegant way to solve this issue (blocking packages on
an aging stage3 tarball). Actually there is (start from a stage1 but then
you can end up struggling with cpp preprocessor missing). I'm too lazy and
scripting a chroot is way faster for me.
So what I do (and I'm currently having the same issue as you do), I copy a
portage snapshot inside the temp dir
(/var/tmp/catalyst/tmp/default/whatever/usr/portage/) chroot into it and
correct whatever was blocking my build. I then rerun catalyst and here it
goes. Before you pack the whole as an iso, don't forget to remove the
portage snapshot or your livecd will be oversized.

I know it is ugly, but it does the trick.

To give an idea, here is my routine to build/patch a stage1.
#!/bin/bash
set -e
set -x
vs=0.1.10
pv="20081124"
CHROOT="/var/tmp/catalyst/tmp/default/livecd-stage1-x86-genluks-$vs"
catalyst -a -f genluks-stage1.spec || {

        rsync -av /var/tmp/catalyst/snapshot_cache/$pv/portage $CHROOT/usr
        #echo "emerge autounmask;autounmask
app-misc/livecd-tools-1.0.40_pre3;autounmask sys-apps/hwsetup-1.2;emerge
livecd-tools hwsetup udev" > $CHROOT/lo
        echo "emerge -f e2fsprogs e2fsprogs-libs && emerge --unmerge ss
com_err e2fsprogs && emerge e2fsprogs e2fsprogs-libs" > $CHROOT/lo
        chroot $CHROOT  bash /lo
        rm -rf $CHROOT/usr/portage/*
        rm $CHROOT/lo
        catalyst -f genluks-stage1.spec
}

I'm currently running it and it works like a charm.

Hope it helps in some way.

Erick

On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 2:29 AM, Andrew Gaffney <agaffney@gentoo.org> wrote:

> Dio, James wrote:
>
>> Thank you for your response, in an effort to make sure that everything
>> is using the same snapshot, I have done everything over again and have
>> the same issue, and included the spec files I used.
>> I had wanted to purge everything catalyst has produced so far, however
>> when  I ran catalyst --purge, I get the following error:
>> !!! catalyst: please specify one of either -f or -C
>> When I specify both --purge and -f (some spec file) it attempts to build
>> the stage instead of purge. Should I open a bug for this?
>>
>
> No, that's how it's supposed to work. The purge isn't an operation all by
> itself. It's just an additional step that's performed before a build.
>
>
>  Here's what I did:
>> emerge --sync
>> catalyst -s rwmc.001
>> catalyst -f rwmc-stage1.spec
>> catalyst -f rwmc-stage2.spec
>> catalyst -f rwmc-stage3.spec
>>
>> rwmc-stage1.spec contains:
>> subarch: x86
>> target: stage1
>> version_stamp: rwmc.001
>> rel_type: default
>> profile: default/linux/x86/2008.0
>> snapshot: rwmc.001
>> source_subpath: default/stage3-i686-2008.0
>> chost: i686-pc-linux-gnu
>>
>> rwmc-stage2.spec contains:
>> subarch: i686
>> target: stage2
>> version_stamp: rwmc.001
>> rel_type: default
>> profile: default/linux/x86/2008.0
>> snapshot: rwmc.001
>> source_subpath: default/stage1-x86-rwmc.001
>> chost: i686-pc-linux-gnu
>>
>> rwmc-stage3.spec contains:
>> subarch: i686
>> target: stage3
>> version_stamp: rwmc.001
>> rel_type: default
>> profile: default/linux/x86/2008.0
>> snapshot: rwmc.001
>> source_subpath: default/stage2-i686-rwmc.001
>>
>
> At first glance, everything here looks fine. I'm not sure what to tell you.
>
>
> --
> Andrew Gaffney
> http://dev.gentoo.org/~agaffney/ <http://dev.gentoo.org/%7Eagaffney/>
> Gentoo Linux Developer            Catalyst/Genkernel + Release Engineering
> Lead
>
>