The first major change here is the support of baselayout-2/openrc. So far
Gentoo has not released a stage3 tarball with baselayout-2, but I've tested
this enough that I feel it works even when doing an upgrade. The
baselayout-1 stuff has been converted, however it is recommended to not use
this until baselayout-2 is available in Gentoo stage3s as I don't want to
support converting, or you can do this:
stage4 tarball support. I'm not sure why I didn't support this before.
Now not only can stage4 tarballs be build, instead of or in addition to
virtual appliance images, but stage4 tarballs can also be used in lieu of a
stage3. There is a new "stage4" make target, and also when building the
Makefile will first look for stage4/<appliance>-stage4.tar.bz2 and if that
exists use it instead of the Gentoo stage3. If you specify stage4 as a
target and also already have a stage4, then the Makefile will unpack the
stage4 into the chroot, perform updates, and then re-create the stage4
based on the updates (atomically). In addition there is a new Makefile
variable, SOFTWARE. The default value is "1" meaning it will call the
software target (thereby installing/updatein software), but if you set
SOFTWARE=0, then the software phase will not be run. This can allow, for
example, to build a VM image from a stage4 without performing software
updates, in effect a straight stage4 to image for quick image building.
Since most appliances are pretty much based on the "base" appliance, one
could imply copy the base stage4 to the new appliance stage4 and start from
there, instead of having to start from a vanilla stage3, for example:
# cp stage4/base-stage4.tar.bz2 stage4/kde-stage4.tar.bz2
# make APPLIANCE=kde stage4
Will take the already existing base stage4 and simply update it to kde,
which will be easier/faster than starting from a stage3.
There are still some tweaks that need to be done for the stage4 support.
Specifically Makefile targets need to be written with the assumption that
they may be called more than once (e.g. updating a stage4 or going from
stage4 to image with SOFTWARE=1). For the most part things work according
to that assumption, but there are a few things that need to be tweeked,
such as the inittab settings if one is building a "headed" image but it's
based off a headless stage4. New appliance authors should also write their
"preinstall" and "postinstall" targets with the assmption that it may be
called more than once.
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