Icky on the html email :P

On Wed, Sep 07, 2005 at 05:45:16PM -0700, m h wrote:
> Hello-
> I'm investigating the similarities between portage and openpkg.  More
> specifically I was wondering if it is possible to take portage and
> install in on top of an existing linux installation in its own sandbox

s/sandbox/prefix/
This is what fink does, and what gentoo-osx is moving towards.


> (similar to what openpkg does).  I've done some googling and found the
> documentation about the gentoo sandbox
> ([1]http://bugday.gentoo.org/sandbox.html), but this seems to be a
> tool for checking that ebuilds behave correctly.

Moreso protection, then ensuring they behave correctly; if they do 
something they shouldn't they get blocked from what they're 
attempting.  It's an active tool, rather then a 'check' of the ebuild 
(that and it's limited to linux, no *bsd implementations).

Akin to depriving, although depriving is more effective- one can 
sidestep the sandbox, can't sidestep being de-prived aside from priv 
escalation.


> I've read through
> the developer documentation and didn't find anything there.  Google
> hasn't necessarily been very useful either....
> So, is it possible to sandbox a portage installation on top of say a
> debian or fedora install?  If so, can anyone point me in the right
> direction?

With current ebuilds, nope.  There's no global prefix offset in the 
code for it (root is merge offset, not runtime prefix offset).


> Do any of the devs out here have experience with openpkg?

Pretty much an extension of rpm spec's, afaik.
Beyond that? Heh, nope :)
~harring