Project:Catalyst

Article description::The Catalyst project develops and supports the Catalyst release building tool. Catalyst has been designed to be easy to use, customize, and maintain. It is also used in other Gentoo projects, such as GNAP.

Goals
The goal of the Catalyst project is to provide a single multi-faceted tool that can reliably build all aspects of a Gentoo Linux release: stage tarballs, GRP package sets, and install CDs. The Catalyst tool is intended to be used by those who wish to create their own customized versions of Gentoo Linux, or their own customized LiveCDs.

Specific development goals for Catalyst include:


 * Providing high-quality builds of Gentoo Linux.
 * Powerful yet easy to use, customize, extend, and maintain.
 * Maintainable, top-notch source code.

Mailing list
This email list is for general discussion, help and for submitting patches to the code base for review before inclusion into any of it's primary branches.

Supported architectures
Catalyst supports a number of architectures. An architecture is a general type of CPU platform.

It is important to note for each architecture, Catalyst supports a number of sub-architectures. A sub-architecture is a specific variant of the architecture. For example, pentium4 is a sub-architecture of the architecture.

Notice that all architectures have a sub-architecture with the same name as the architecture. This sub-architecture is meant to represent a "generic" build that should work on all systems in that architecture. Each sub-architecture has an associated set of CFLAGS, CXXFLAGS , as well as a CHOST and set of USE variables that are enabled on that sub-architecture. The USE settings are intended to enable any CPU-specific options, such as  or.