using chroot'ed environment for packaging

[AnotherUser]

Based on what I can find, it looks like the preferred RPM building environment for PCLOS is

• Get a VirtualBox (or other VM)
• Install into it some recent minimalistic PCLOS ISO
• Update the install
• Install pkgutils
• Run the mkrepo script

It seems to me that all of these steps can be combined into a single step of creating a tar ball of an "installed system", and then reusing it as many times as you want by simply extracting it and chroot'ing into it to do the RPM building. Has anyone done that? Are there any down sides to doing this?

[sling-shot]

I have no idea of workings of a chroot setup. Our regular experienced packagers should be along soon with an answer.

With VirtualBox however I am able to save copies of the setup at various points of time and easily rollback as needed. I am also able to package in one environment and test in another and continue other work in the host. Only for final testing of built packages and those which interact with hardware directly, I use a separate partition after a reboot.

[kjpetrie]

It sounds plausible, but you couldn't keep reusing the same tarball, because it would have to be kept upgraded and rearchived. You could use squashfs as an alternative to tar, but I expect the frequent unpacking, upgrading and repacking would become just as tedious as any other method. You would also have to ensure it had the right modules for your running kernel, as unlike a VM, it wouldn't have its own kernel. Would have to be the same arch as your main system too, so you'd still need a machine of the other arch.