[Raion]

So I've been looking around currently for ways in which we can easily package software without using hacks in idb/spec files generated by swpkg.

One idea that I have had and want to run by people here would be to leverage chroot and shell scripts to create a virtual root within which we can have a minimum of necessary files to install an application. 

However I have a couple of questions that aren't well documented in the manpages, and I want to know if this is even worth doing from some people's perspectives.

Basically what the script would do is copy all of the necessary tool chain into the chroot and then the already built program and contents of its build directory. 

It would then run make install, allowing it to go into /usr/nekoware prefix, and then it would automatically launch swpkg with basic spec template already filled out. 

I'm not really sure if this is the best approach however because I've only really worked with this on Linux and BSD. On there it is usually pretty straightforward to achieve this.

Once swpkg was done, you'd simply exit out, and it would automatically check for the dist files and then tar cf them, then move them out of the chroot and destroy the contents of the chroot. 

I think that my methodology is pretty sound here but I don't even know if that's the biggest hurdle for most people with swpkg. 

As I've kind of said on this issue before there is no free lunch. Any approach that we take is going to necessarily require some form of sacrifice and I'm willing to manually build a tardist in that case, especially as the majority of RELEASE is likely to be carried over with each new iteration.

It would be nice to automate tardist creation, it would be nice to have tools that can do gendist on non-IRIX platforms, but we don't have that for now.