Re: VM images for FreeBSD

On 19/10/2011, at 21:19, Alexander Yerenkow wrote:
> I can't specify to pkg_add that it should treat /zpool0/testroot as root, as
> I need (so record really should be _at_cwd /usr/local)
> Instead, pkg_add allows me to make chroot, which as you understand is not
> good (In specified chroot all required by pkg* binaries/libraries must
> exists, unfortunately I can't specify some empty dir and install there).

Hmmm, why is it empty?
When I have made something analogous I did an installkernel/world into a directory and then chroot'd in there and built ports. There is no reason you couldn't pkg_add from a local mirror (or nullfs mount a local package mirror directory into the chroot).

> Why is that? Because there is +INSTALL script in packages, in which
> package/port system allows execute any code/script written by porter.

This is a feature ;)

> To summarize my efforts:
> I checked 21195 packages;
> I found 880 install scripts;
> 
> 3 scripts contains plain "exit 0"
> 8 install scripts contains some perl code;
> 17 scripts contains some additional "install" commands;
> 70 scripts contains some chgroup/chown actions (which probably could be done
> by specifying mtree file?...)
> 75 contains uncategorized actions (print of license, some interactive
> questions, ghostscript actions, tex, fonts etc.)
> 161 scripts contains some file commands, like (ld / cp / mv, creating
> backups, creating configs if they aren't exists etc. )
> 166 scripts contains useradd/groupadd commands (many similar constructions,
> not too hard to move this to .mk, in pkgng group/users can be specified in
> yaml config)
> 380 contains pear component registration (md5 -q * | uniq  - produces
> exactly one result, so these all scripts are really one, could be moved to
> some pear.mk)

Interesting stats, thanks for taking the time to do the analysis.

I think one of the reasons pkg_add is so slow is that it copies everything to a staging directory, then copies the files.. This is very tedious (obviously). I wonder if it could be modified to have a "stream" mode where it unpacks directly into the target FS.

Alternatively you could cut it in 2 conceptually and modify pkg_add so it can run it a mode where it just unpacks to a staging area, and another mode where it copies from the staging area to the destination.

--
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
  -- Andrew Tanenbaum
GPG Fingerprint - 5596 B766 97C0 0E94 4347 295E E593 DC20 7B3F CE8C