Dave Huseby:
I'm a Bitrig [0] user and have been slowly patching up gitian-builder so that it knows how to create build VM's other than ubuntu [1]. I haven't pushed all of my patches yet, but I have a version of gitian-builder where make-base-vm understands "--os bitrig --iso cd10.iso" and it auto-installs Bitrig into a VM. My goal is to build Bitrig deterministically using gitian and I'm getting pretty close to at least doing builds. I'm not sure about the other roadblocks yet (e.g. timestamps, etc).
thanks for working on this. It is an interesting idea to enhance Gitian in this way and it might help us to look at the differences that building with a Debian build VM would bring us (and to eliminate them). (although for this use case it might be easier to just patch python-vm-builder accordingly). I'd be interested in hearing about the progress you are making and the issues you are running into.
I think my effort to add gitian support other OS's for build VM's would enable building the TBB using the target OS rather than cross-compiling from ubuntu. The only downside I can see is the increase in work trying to keep TBB building on all of these other platforms.
Yes + it makes Gitian more complex due to necessary patches for each OS you start to support. Setting the different environments up should be a one-time task and new descriptors need to be written anyway. Thus, that should not matter so much then.
Georg