uClibc testing

As I said on What did Enterprise do?, I had (and have again) a series of chroots I use for testing particular setups; I have, for instance, one running OpenPAM that can tell me whether the software in the tree have the proper dependencies (either sys-libs/pam if it wants Linux-PAM or virtual/pam if it works with OpenPAM).

Since yesterday, thanks to solar, I have a new addition to my testing rig: an uclibc chroot. I asked solar to get me something I could download and run locally as I had to fix a bug with PAM which is now fixed.

I have to say that I don’t know much yet about the setup of uClibc itself, which means I haven’t gotten to understand well yet how iconv is supported in it. Certainly I now know that once USE-based dependencies will be available in the tree I’ll try once again to see if libiconv can be used for something else beside Gentoo/FreeBSD (but the collision with man-pages should be solved before that, if it’s not already).

Even though I know solar does not really wish for me to mess in with NLS and uClibc, I find it a pretty important part of Gentoo/FreeBSD work, I always found it as such, the reason for this is that it’s easier to fix something the right way when you have more than one alternative case. Otherwise you might end up special casing something that should be made generic instead.

I also expect Gentoo/FreeBSD 7 to be upcoming, and that will probably mean my return to that too, now that I can get a VirtualBox running at a decent speed.

But I haven’t even started setting up the uClibc chroot to speed with what I want to do, in particular I want to set up my cowstats script on that too, and maybe one day adding the flags testing script too (which is unfortunately disruptive).

All in all, I hope that having an uclibc chroot around will allow the packages I maintain to work out of the box on uClibc, it’s going to be a pretty interesting task.