Ascendos (El-)Build Testing
Ascendos is driven at least in part by the idea that the entire build process for your *EL distro should be a transparent, well-known quantity. To achieve that goal, your benevolent lead developer, has put together the 'el-build' tool. It is an attempt to abstract the complete core OS output's build process, into a single tool. In addition, the tool is designed to first gather its input of upstream source packages, and open-source bootstrap OS components from their well known places on the internet (primarily mirrors.kernel.org). Then, having gathered all the inputs, a subsequent verification of those inputs is performed, followed by a completely automated build procedure. These latter phases can be performed on completely offline system(s) if so desired. Before embarking however, please also keep in mind this sage wisdom from the relevant GNU Public License-
"This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details."
Currently the basic usage/testing path can be summarized as follows:
Get The Tools/Source (from the internet)
It's as easy as-
- git clone git://github.com/Ascendos/Ascendos
Please browse the README and referenced documentation for an initial overview of the tools.
Note that in your home directory you should have 300G of free space available to be on the safe side. Various useful options are more and less documented, i.e. everything in Ascendos/tools/scripts/defaults can be overridden with an equivalent entry in ~/.el-build/config, if not yet a more handy commandline option.
Pre-fetching Input (from the internet)
WARNING: it is a rather sad state of inefficiency, but presently this will download probably 100G of open source software, beyond the perhaps 10G it actually needs. This will be remedied as soon as possible. But if you are fortunate enough to have a sufficiently uncapped ISP, and are very interested in testing, then by all means, I think your bandwidth is as deserving as all that ad-bandwidth being used...
- # gather bootstrap materials
- ./Ascendos/tools/bin/el-build update-net-cache
- # gather upstream source packages
- ./Ascendos/tools/bin/el-build mirror-tuv-srpms-el6
Building/Baking The Distribution (offline if desired)
WARNING: this requires a 64-bit libvirt capable CPU, and will still probably take a week, and not quite output fully usable results. But by the time you notice and ask why, you'll have probably inspired a bugfix and will be asked to continue helping testing and development of this ambitious tool.
- ./Ascendos/tools/bin/el-build bake outputdir=/your/output/path