bugzilla #164441 (mock-helper and basedir)

[Dan Williams]

On Fri, 2006-02-24 at 17:02 -0600, Clark Williams wrote:
> Hi all, 
> 
> I've been looking at how to change mock  so that the build chroot's can
> be placed at arbitrary locations (as opposed to the current
> hardcoded /var/lib/mock). The main reason I want to do this is that I
> build target root filesystems for embedded targets in our compile farm
> and we use a big NFS filesystem as our main storage. I can access the
> build directory and our cross-toolchains from any system in our farm and
> nothing that's specific to a build is on any farm system (I can
> kickstart it at will and not lose anything). Yes, we've successfully
> redirected /var/lib/mock to the NFS storage with a mount --bind but I
> just find that kinda scary. I'm just not very confident in remounting an
> NFS filesystem to a local filesystem. The bottom line is that I'd like
> to remove dependencies on the build system's local filesystem and move
> it all to the NFS storage.

I can't speak for Seth, but I'm fairly sure the answer here is "use bind
mounts".  Seth is very big on the FHS, and in the FHS, that's where the
buildroots and other stuff for mock are supposed to live.  I've asked
about this long ago, when starting to use mock for the build system, and
that was the answer.  Seriously, bind mounts are neither complicated,
nor problematic, though I haven't done a ton of testing with NFS.

The other question is why you want the buildroots on NFS in the first
place.  Unless you have blazingly fast storage, it's likely that local
SCSI disk will be quite a bit faster than NFS.  Since creating buildroot
and doing the actual builds involves _quite_ a lot of IO, the same issue
applies; local storage is likely better unless you've got really a fast
path to the shared storage.

Dan