Funtoo:Metatools/Advanced Usage

Subpages:

Gitolite Setup

   Important

These pages are out of date. Please see the latest Funtoo:Metatools page for usage information.

Overview

Funtoo Linux uses "merge scripts" to create its kits and update meta-repo. These scripts work by sourcing ebuilds from various overlays, and combining them using special algorithms to yield the kits you use. A meta-repo is also generated, which points to the specific kits generated that are designed to work together.

Before starting, please read and understand the following pages:

• Kit-fixups
• Kit-fixups/FAQ

Different Approaches

merge-all-kits can be used in a variety of ways. If you are an individual developer, you may want to use merge-all-kits in developer mode, which is its default mode. Developer mode makes it easy to generate a meta-repo and kits that you can test locally.

In developer mode, a meta-repo and all automatically-generated kit git repositories are created from scratch. These git repositories will have no remotes, so they will simply exist locally on disk, and they will not have any history shared with the Funtoo project. It you look at the commit history for the kits and meta-repo, you will see that they essentially have no history.

Another way to use merge-all-kits is with gitolite as a remote, which is documented under the Gitolite Setup sub-page. Using this configuration, merge-all-kits will write all of its destination git repositories to gitolite. You can then configure other systems to ego sync from gitolite as a source. This can be good in a distributed development environment. This method can also be used to create a meta-repo and kits that diverge from Funtoo's kit but still connect to its history.

Finally, the merge-all-kits script can be run in a production mode, which is very similar to using it with gitolite except that you may be pushing up your destination meta-repo and kits to a public location like GitHub or GitLab.

When first starting out with merge-all-kits, you should definitely start with developer mode and see if that meets your needs first.

Getting The Code

You can find the code that does this on code.funtoo.org, housed at code.funtoo.org. The script that does all the heavy-lifting is called merge-all-kits. Let's clone it from git, on the machine that will be generating new kits and meta-repo:

user $ git clone https://code.funtoo.org/bitbucket/scm/core/merge-scripts.git

You will also want to install the following dependencies so that the code can run:

root # emerge jinja lxml

Configuration and Paths

In general, you should run merge-all-kits as a regular user, and this user needs to be a member of the portage group.

In the user's home directory, create a ~/.merge directory with the following contents:

   /root/.merge

[sources]

flora = https://code.funtoo.org/bitbucket/scm/co/flora.git
kit-fixups = https://code.funtoo.org/bitbucket/scm/co/flora.git
gentoo-staging = https://code.funtoo.org/bitbucket/scm/auto/gentoo-staging.git

[branches]

flora = master
kit-fixups = master
meta-repo = master

By default, merge-all-kits will create a ~/repo_tmp directory where it will store all of its work. Inside ~/repo_tmp/source-trees, source git trees that will be used to generate meta-repo will be cloned. Inside ~/repo_tmp/dest-trees, git repositories will be created to write results into. The meta-repo will be stored at /~repo_temp/dest-trees/meta-repo, and in developer mode, the kits will be stored in meta-repo, at ~/repo_tmp/dest-trees/meta-repo/kits, so that meta-repo is configured 'ready to use' at it would appear at /var/git/meta-repo. When 'production' mode is specified via the --prod switch, the meta-repo will not have kits stacked inside it but instead the kits will be written directly into ~/repo_tmp/dest-trees.

A metadata cache will also be created and stored at ~/repo_tmp/metadata-cache, and your user must be a member of the portage group for merge-all-scripts to be able to properly generate the metadata cache.

Running Merge-All-Kits

To run merge-all-kits, use it as follows:

user $ path/to/merge-scripts/bin/merge-all-kits 1.4-release

The script will then run, and it will git clone flora, kit-fixups and gentoo-staging from the URIs in the ~/.merge file, and assemble them into a complete meta-repo. The meta-repo will be located at $HOME/repo_tmp/dest-trees/meta-repo.

To use the meta-repo for testing, you can add the following lines to /etc/ego.conf:

   /etc/ego.conf

[global]
meta_repo_path = /home/user/repo_tmp/dest-trees/meta-repo

Then, using ego 2.8.0 or later, run the following command:

root # ego sync --in-place

This will ensure that the proper kit branches in your meta-repo are checked out and that all the repos.conf and profiles files in /etc/portage are configured correctly for your repository to be used. Note that no actual "git pull" will be performed -- this is intentional and a special feature of the --in-place option -- because your local git repositories have no remotes to pull from and contain all the information they need to be used.

You're now ready to use your meta-repo directly:

root # emerge foo