[gentoo-dev] Announcing project Chinstrap

[Spider <spider@gentoo.org>]

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The amazing marvellous always late project is now ready to be announced!

http://chinstrap.alternating.net/


What is it:
   It started as an automated regression test of the tree, I wanted to
see how much worked and didn't.  From there it moved on to provide GRP
builds for fast install, Got a webpage and an ftp, and suddenly had a
pretty nice infrastructure in place with mailinglists and all.

Here's what it is :
  Testing, Beta, Trial,  premade binaries of common tools in a Gentoo
installation.

Here's what it isn't :
   Official Gentoo Project.  This was started by me to see how viable it
is, and its not an official Gentoo project. 


Here's how to use it :
    Edit /etc/make.conf
    add PORTAGE_BINHOST as one of the following :
		http://chinstrap.alternating.net/files/binaries/i686/
		ftp://ftp.alternating.net/chinstrap/binaries/i686/
   
   emerge -gkvp gnome  (For example)

Here's what's needed:
	A pentium 2 class processor. That is "i686", so all Pentium3, Pentium4,
	Athlon, Athlon-xp  should work nicely.  This was a tradeoff we had to
	make due to resource limitations.
	



Here it is :
     http://chinstrap.alternating.net/






Q/A:
My favourite package isn't included!
	- Doesn't build reliably in an automated environment?
	- I hadn't thought about it.

Things break. Foo doesn't start!
	- run revdep-rebuild -p and send me the output, along with the
	   filenames + package names that don't work.

There are red x all over the screen? is that an error?
	- nope. thats portage doing the right thing. Scary, isn't it?

This is unsafe.
	- see MD5SUM in the dir, and MD5SUM.asc to verify that the md5's
	haven't changed. Thats the best I can offer.	

Does this even work?
	- We have a few testers that have reported bugs and successess. Overall
	its been quite good.

This is so not Gentoo!
	-I cut the install down to about an hour, and that includes
	Gnome, Mozilla, Open Office .    Thats a choice I -like- to be able to
	make. 

Cool! What can I do?
	- Reinstall stuffs and try it out? See how things work. Tell me of
	packages you'd want to see built like this.  Even come close to 
	suggesting OpenOffice and I'll.......

What issues are there?
	- A lot of developers are lazy and haven't accorded for "hidden
	dependencies"  and just trust autodetection magic for packages.
	This causes strange runtime dependencies that arent reproducible at all
	times.  This is the most annoying thing I've been batteling throughout
	this.



Regards
		Spider at behalf of the Chinstrap project

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