Re: [atomic-devel] linux-user-chroot v2015.1

[Colin Walters <walters verbum org>]

On Sun, Sep 6, 2015, at 12:54 PM, James wrote:

> Interesting... Does any of this/can any of this overlap with the xdg-app
> work alexl is doing?

Somewhat, yes; xdg-app is also intended for unprivileged use.  Some of
the initial setuid core of xdg-app was based on linux-user-chroot.  Since
then I've taken some code back from xdg-app:

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg-app/2015-September/000007.html

We'll continue to share code and ideas, though we have different target
audiences.  linux-user-chroot's primary audience is build system authors.
xdg-app is targeting desktop apps.  Neither are presently targeted for
servers, although you *could* use linux-user-chroot for servers.

Long term, I'd like for Docker or other server-oriented container tools
to learn how to support "pure non root" better.  A simplistic way
to do this would be to have an unprivileged "docker pull" like
systemd-importd is doing, then use linux-user-chroot.

> Is there an extra unwanted space after the $(pwd) and before the /    ?

Nope; the bare '/' there is denoting the chroot target, which as '/' is
just using the host.  This alias is for when I'm in developer mode
and just using the -devel packages on the host workstation.

Some future work here is to merge some of the work done in
supermin (http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/supermin/) to unpack
RPMs as non-root, then merged with linux-user-chroot it'll start
to bring together a lot of what gnome-continuous has been doing
on the build server side for non-root chroot building with the RPM
world.