mikem

The team does their development on Fedora Core 6. I run Gentoo on my notebook, which is great for ssh-ing into my workstation and VMs to develop. When working from home I get less-than-optimal latency to the office. And my ssh sessions get disconnect after 30-minutes of inactivity, a mild annoyance when some of my windows disconnect while I’m intensely hacking away.

I decided to get the development environment set up on my Gentoo machine. This has led me to explore some of the requirements to build and run Kusu. Here’s an incomplete list:

* sqlite 3.3+
* pysqlite 2.3.3
* cmake 2.4.6
* newt 0.52.2 (needed for snack.py)
* parted 1.8.2
* pyparted 1.8.5
* cpio 2.6 (or patched 2.7)

cmake was the first to bite me. Version 2.4.6 is still marked ~x86 for Gentoo, so I had 2.4.3 installed. After some wading through makefiles, and seeing targets for non-existent files, Najib suggested comparing versions… and of course, that was it.

pyparted was more obvious. For some reason the most recent version in portage is 1.7.0, which tanked with Kusu. I had to install version 1.8.5 from source from David Cantrell’s website. I guess I should roll an ebuild and submit it.

Finally the cpio issue. The boot-media-tool uses cpio in the creation of a bootable image. Fedora uses cpio 2.6, which works fine. I had 2.7 installed, which does not preserve file permissions. This caused the install to bypass Kusu altogether and launch right into Anaconda. Fortunately, this has been patched and upgrading to cpio-2.7-r2 solved the problem.

So while there are no plans to support it, there’s nothing preventing you from developing Kusu on Gentoo