For those of us who need access to gcloop I think it would be a welcome feature to enable all the patches (kernel and util-linux) via a USE flag. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3.
Eh? There are no use flags for kernel patches. Gentoo doesn't even support experimental kernels, see http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-kernel.xml Well, maintainer decision how to deal with this request.
I'm quite surprised somebody is still interested on gcloop since I havent heard any request/offers ot help about it in months. The kernel patches would require some changes and a in kernel ucl is a must need... The userspace patches should work w/out many problems. I haven't updated the project mainly because of lack of time and on second stance because nobody seems interested and squashfs seems stable enough and good for the same gcloop purposes. I'm quite agains double efforts if there isn't the need. If you think gcloop would be a good solution for you (maybe because you need to use a particular compressor or other reason) I'll be happy to help you within my time constraints
Well the story goes like this. I heard about this new method for mounting up livecds that Ubuntu is using, coined Casper. It's basically device-mapper doing writable snapshots. Now for this to work you have to have your livecd image in some writable fs image + compression. This requirement knocks squashfs / cramfs / zisofs out of the picture since they are both read-only. So I wen't wtih gcloop + ext2, since it's a nice little compression solution thats already (sort of supported) in Gentoo. After massive amounts of bash scripting I have a working snapshotted gentoo livecd running in qemu, boots up with only 22Megs used with everything writable. I was hoping to get some sort of USE flag for gcloop so I could automate my livecd creation process. This is due to the fact I don't use catalyst, but instead a bunch of slick scripts I wrote. I guess the ideal solution for everybody would be just to have catalyst handle gcloop, but I got greedy and thought I should toss the idea out there.
catalyst supported gcloop in its early days, if the code isn't removed it still does. The current problem is that nobody had the time and the will to port the ucl lib in the kernel OR hack the userspace tools to use zlib, beside that the loop patch should still work and shouldn't hard move it to dm. Them problem is only will and time since are just easy but boring and long tasks
Well I'll submit this idea to the Livecd Herd, since it makes setting up a livecd environment a walk in the park. If they take some interest in writable snapshots, then gcloop won't be so unpopularly any more. For my own project I have infinite time to hack patches and deal with busybox.
The releng devs seem set on using unionfs.
