User:Maffblaster/Drafts/Advanced ebuild testing guide

This guide provides instructions for users to create their own chroot test environments. This is helpful for those who would like to test their ebuilds in a basic, pollution free environment.

Introduction
Chroots have been around for a long time. Apparently the first "chroot" system call was introduced in Version 7 Unix in 1979. They are essential to the Gentoo installation process (those who have followed the Gentoo Handbook have worked in a chroot environment). Originating with the development of Gentoo the term "stage tarball" was created to help the Gentoo Release Engineering team define what tasks still needed completing in a chroot environment. Read up on the four levels of stage tarballs in the stage tarball article.

Official Gentoo Stage3 tarballs
The officially generated stage3 tarballs from the Release Engineering project are perfect specimens to use for creating new chroots, they can be generally obtained from the following links:

For the remainder of this guide, it will be presumed the reader will be using the btrfs filesystem for the partition containing the ebuild test chroots. If btrfs cannot be used any Linux friendly filesystem will work. Space is cheap these days!

After the current stage3 files have been downloaded, create a nicely laid out directory structue and a couple of subvolumes as a target for the tarballs to be extracted:

Now extract the tarballs to the appropriate directory. Be careful to preserve extended filesystem attributes and access control lists:

Now that the base chroots are created, this may be a stopping point for some readers. If the ebuild(s) that will be tested are not specific to a certain desktop profile only a few more steps are needed. Jump down to Mounting the Portage tree.

Snapshotting system profiles
Those who are testing ebuilds with graphical components have a bit more work to do in order to prepare a sound test environment. It is time to create snapshots for the relevant system profiles. Suppose the ebuild(s) being tested run on the GTK graphical framework. It would be wise at this point to create a couple more base snapshots; this time with the Gnome desktop in mind:

Mounting the Portage tree
Next, these snapshots will need to be updated, but before that can be done the host machine's main Gentoo repository must be shared to them:

Chroot into each location using pychroot and make sure each are up-to-date:

Be sure to source after the chroot!

Finally, the accurate profile name (base this on the snapshot's location) and rebuild the @world set. For example, for the deskop/gnome/systemd snapshot:

Mounting the test repository
The final step before complete testing is to share the testing repository to the chroot. This is done quickly and easily by recursively bind mounting the repository and then creating a entry for the repository in the test chroot.

Open a terminal outside the chroot:

Start testing ebuilds!

Custom stage3 tarballs
Have a currently running system that would be nice to use a test environment? Use the command to compress it into a stage3 or stage4 tarball, just make sure to label it appropriately:

Snapshotable filesystems (btrfs, zfs)
When using a filesystem that has the capability to create snapshots, it is possible to quickly generate chroot test environments.

Btrfs
To make a 'chroot' snapshot of the currently running system with btrfs, issue:

Then simply run the mount commands for the appropriate virtual filesystems.

Zfs
If you want to take a snapshot of a single dataset in zfs you would do the following:

If you want to take a snapshot of every dataset under a particular dataset, you can do:

ZFS snapshots are read-only. If you want to create a writeable dataset, use the "clone" command on a snapshot. Example:

If you have a "tank/gentoo/chroot" dataset that you want to make clones from, you would first take a snapshot to save a read only copy, and then we would make how many clones from that as you desire:

zfs snapshot tank/gentoo/chroot@testingBase zfs clone tank/gentoo@chroot@testingBase tank/gentoo/container1 zfs clone tank/gentoo@chroot@testingBase tank/gentoo/container2 zfs clone tank/gentoo@chroot@testingBase tank/gentoo/container3

If after a while you decide that you want to delete chroot, all of it's snapshots, and all of its dependent clones, you can actually do that in one command:

LXC
https://github.com/globalcitizen/lxc-gentoo

https://github.com/specing/lxc-gentoo