Potential benefits

Running tests

• test BEFORE (src_test) and AFTER (pkg_postinst) installation
• test if and how services break if they are not reloaded
• test buildsystem configuration
• sandbox enforces strict and consistent build rules
• benchmarking with different compilation flags and libraries versions/releases

Configuration matrix

We can test across Cartesian product of different configuration settings, like:

• USE flags
• MAKEOPTS
• CFLAGS, CXXFLAGS, CPPFLAGS, LDFAGS, RUSTFLAGS, etc.
• arches (cross-compilation or run in qemu)
• static linking
• supported releases & versions of libraries (eg. glibc & musl)

Also, we could create diffs of installed files across different merges.

Reproducibility

• mini overlay with ::gentoo or any other (eg. company's own) as master
• record VCS (eg. git) hash of the dependent overlays

Binaries

• grab dependencies from binhosts
• distribute built binaries (maybe upload to a company's own artifacts server)
• make AppImages

Getting there

How do we run this?

Do we want to write a proper tool, which we probably do or do we just run Portage + shells scripts?

Do we want to run under root, user, in eprefix, maybe all in docker?

Configuration files

The .portci directory contains the configuration.

Bug 799626

Link: bugs.gentoo.org/799626

Instead of using Ansible, Python, Yaml or Scheme we might use something similar to this for simple configuration, or if gets merged to upstream Portage the better.

Worth mentioning is the idea from Michał Górny who proposes to configure portage with toml files, like the example given in the bug report.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

[package.unmask]
~virtual/libcrypt-2

[package.use.mask]
sys-libs/libxcrypt -system -split-usr

[package.use.force]
sys-libs/glibc -crypt

Also, package.x + Toml == a match made in heaven, it looks very nice!

Switching from a git repository hosting

For nearly 2 years I have been synchronizing settings between my Gentoo machines via a git repository that is installed system-wide via portage itself.

This actually gets a little tiresome and slow as the package that installs the configuration has to be re-installed each time we want to update the settings.

So I thought it could be cool if I can just push files around between my machines with one command. Now: we can use rsync or scp but /etc/portage is owned by root so we either have to change the permissions to a user we use to ssh or a group that user is in.

Portage users

First change portage permissions of /etc/portage, now all users in the portage group will be able to modify the configuration

1
2

chown -R root:portage /etc/portage
chmod -R g+w /etc/portage

Synchronizing

We can do a rsync from different machine with:

1

rsync -r /etc/portage REMOTEHOST:/etc --exclude=".git" --exclude="make.profile" --copy-unsafe-links

Reminder that this can also be done as a cron job!

Portage snapshots with git

Probably the best thing I got out of genlica is that I engineered a script to automatically do a git commit of the changes to the portage configuration.

Emerge git

1

emerge --noreplace --verbose dev-vcs/git

Copy the file that does the snapshots

1
2

mkdir -p /etc/portage/postsync.d
curl -o /etc/portage/postsync.d/99-degitmerge.sh "https://gitlab.com/xgqt/genlica/-/raw/master/portage/postsync.d/99-degitmerge.sh"

Intro

Sage may be available on your distro but on Gentoo such frivolities for students are not there yet, so I had to install it the manual way.

User

I went to the Sage website, to the "download-source" link. The source mirror I picked was France.

Ok, so let's follow Sage Math build instructions and get it going

1
2
3
4
5

wget www-ftp.lip6.fr/pub/math/sagemath/src/sage-9.2.tar.gz
tar xvf sage-9.2.tar.gz
cd sage-9.2
./configure
make

And now, let's wait…

Portage

After a long, long, long time waiting I remembered that there existed a Gentoo overlay for Sage. And in the meantime I thought I'd try that solution instead since some good Gentoo people already did most of the effort.

Just a few files to edit…

File: /etc/portage/repos.conf/sage-on-gentoo.conf

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14

# -*- conf -*-


[sage-on-gentoo]

auto-sync = yes
location = /var/db/repos/sage-on-gentoo
priority = 999
sync-git-clone-extra-opts = --depth=999999999 --no-shallow-submodules --verbose
sync-git-pull-extra-opts = --verbose
sync-type = git
sync-umask = 022
sync-uri = https://github.com/cschwan/sage-on-gentoo.git
sync-user = root:portage

File: /etc/portage/package.accept~keywords~/zz-sage

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20

# -*- conf -*-


sci-mathematics/sage                    **

*/*::sage-on-gentoo

dev-python/cvxopt

media-gfx/tachyon

sci-libs/bliss
sci-libs/dsdp
sci-libs/fflas-ffpack
sci-libs/fplll
sci-libs/libhomfly
sci-libs/linbox
sci-libs/m4rie

sci-mathematics/glpk

File: /etc/portage/package.use/zz-sage

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20

# -*- conf -*-


sci-mathematics/sage                    -doc-html -doc-html-bin
sci-mathematics/sage                    -doc-pdf -doc-pdf-bin
sci-mathematics/sage                    -jmol
sci-mathematics/sage                    X bliss meataxe

dev-python/pplpy                        doc

sci-libs/cddlib                         tools
sci-libs/pynac                          -giac

sci-mathematics/eclib                   flint
sci-mathematics/flint                   ntl
sci-mathematics/glpk                    gmp
sci-mathematics/gmp-ecm                 -openmp
sci-mathematics/lcalc                   pari
sci-mathematics/maxima                  ecls
sci-mathematics/pari                    gmp doc

Now - let's build Sage with Portage!

>>> Emerging (1 of 100) sci-mathematics/cliquer–1.21::gentoo

At least I know more or less how long I'm going to wait and know what exactly fails to build, if anything does.

Final

Build

$ qlop -tv sage

> 2021–03–23T20:49:12 >>> sci-mathematics/sage–9999: 55′04″

Git stats

Overlays

This info we can easily gather with executing:

1

emerge --info

Gentoo' HEAD: 33f2d770c28307b1e9a1199c681e1c543602c6d4

Sage-on-Gentoo's HEAD: f7eac5b7e1a844132164b7593dab85cd87918664

Sage

Sage repository's HEAD (because we are using the live (9999) ebuild):

1

cat /var/cache/distfiles/git3-src/sagemath_sage.git/refs/heads/develop

Which returns: 5cb72aade9b297c10bb0f1ae8529466e5b5eb41d

Intro

Backing up using this method takes a lot less space - ~60MB (without distfiles) and can be restored on almost any system (running portage) and tweaked afterwards for, say, CPU architecture. I've created a a short script with similar method in here.

What we need

• ebuild repositories are installed with git
• distfiles (those might be gone when we want to replicate)

Backup

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24

# System info
emerge --info > info.txt

# Portage tree
cp -Lr /etc/portage .

# Portage layout
tree -a -L 2 /etc/portage > layout.txt

# Packages in @world
cp /var/lib/portage/world .

# Installed sets
cp /var/lib/portage/world_sets .

# Installed packages (with versions)
qlist --installed --nocolor --umap > qlist-use.txt
qlist --installed --nocolor --verbose > qlist-ver.txt

# Distfiles
cp -rv "$(portageq envvar DISTDIR)" distfiles

# Ebuild database
cp -r /var/db/pkg pkgdb

Restoration

To faithfully restore the system perform those actions as root

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17

# Copy the portage tree to /etc
rm -dr /etc/portage
cp -r portage /etc/portage

# Checkout the gentoo repo to a commit specified in info.txt
cd "$(portageq get_repo_path / gentoo)"
git checkout # <commit ID>

# Copy distfiles
cp -r distfiles/* "$(portageq envvar DISTDIR)"/

# Fake-install @world and sets
cp world /var/lib/portage/world
cp world_sets /var/lib/portage/world_sets

# Emerge the exact packages from qlist-ver.txt
emerge --keep-going=y -1Oav $(sed 's/^/=/' qlist-ver.txt)