Re: [gentoo-dev] Google SOC 2008

[Fabian Groffen <grobian@gentoo.org>]

On 27-02-2008 13:56:51 +0000, Roy Marples wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 27 Feb 2008 13:29:15 +0100, Fabian Groffen <grobian@gentoo.org>
> wrote:
> > Well... that's great!  But a jail or a (ch)root is in general not the
> > same as a "prefix".
> 
> No, but it's the same kettle of fish as chroots, jails and vps systems -
> basically
> there is a need to disable dependencies that provide what the host already
> does.

Ok, the host will for instance do "net", so "need net" should indeed not
fail.  However I could imagine that "need net" would just get satisfied
or something, like by a dummy.

> We current have nojail for FreeBSD jails, novps for VServer/OpenVZ systems
> and
> a few others. I would be trivial to add another no for prefix :)

I just need the machinery of "runscript" as first thing, I suppose.  If
we need a dozen of no* things for that, it probably indicates some
problem, but could work for me.  I want a framework to start and stop
daemons in Prefix, and it feels obvious that we can reuse existing code
for that.

> >  I have to look more closely at what openrc does
> > these days, but for the (ancient) version of baselayout we have in
> > prefix now, I recall that:
> > a) most of it didn't compile on Darwin and Solaris
> 
> It compiles and works on Linux/glibc/uclibc, FreeBSD-6 and NetBSD-4.
> So it stands a fair chance of working on Darwin for sure.

Well...  I've some experience here, and I'm not as sure as you ;)
Anyway, I concur the codebase has changed dramatically since, and
probably in favour of portability.

> I have no idea about Solaris, but it should work as it sports libkvm which
> we use to find processes.

Part of the summer of code project to me would be to 1) evaluate to what
extent this is all necessary in the Prefix equivalent and 2) create/fix
the code.

> > And maybe even a sort of init-level stuff, such that one can start all
> > services in the Prefix and stop them as well.  That basically gets quite
> > useful once Prefix goes "privileged" and you could start sshd, slapd,
> > apache2, etc, etc. on privileged ports, and you really would like those
> > to be started as well in some correct order (on e.g. Solaris).
> 
> If OpenRC compiles and /bin/sh points to a POSIX shell it should work as it
> stands.

Ok, then we already fail here.
/bin/sh is no way POSIX, it is just bourne, so that's where we come in
and simply use /usr/bin/env {sh,bash,posix-sh} or a full path to make
your assumption true.

> At present there is no need for the default interpreter to be changed, but
> there may
> be the need for Prefix.

See above.  But that's trivial work, that we do all the time.  For the
GSoC I see more challenges in the rest of the job and to make some
obvious examples.

But then again, it was just a mere suggestion.  If everything is already
there then fine, but we still need someone (Google code or not) to do
it, as it's currently not.  I'm not sure how far OpenRC actually can
deal with unprivileged installs, so that are just things we have to find
out along the way.


-- 
Fabian Groffen
Gentoo on a different level
-- 
gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org mailing list