On 10/20/21 6:32 PM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:

Hi!

On 10/20/21 17:26, Christian Goll wrote:

...

tools like singularity (https://github.com/hpcng/github) can be used to create containers of older distributions, like sle12 or centos-7. What I'm missing in openSUSE, is the possibility to cross-bootstrap. In Debian, we have a script called rebootstrap [1] and it allows to bootstrap Debian for any supported from x86_64 completely from source.

Yeah. Something similar would be fantastic! Bastille (a FreeBSD jail management system) also uses it to create Ubuntu Linux jails under FreeBSD. I did a dirty hack to install openSUSE, but that's really a hack, and not something elegant: https://peter.czanik.hu/posts/opensuse_in_bastille/ Peter

Jan Engelhardt wrote:

On Wednesday 2021-10-20 17:26, Christian Goll wrote:

...

Hello, tools like singularity (https://github.com/hpcng/github) can be used to create containers of older distributions, like sle12 or centos-7. With tumbleweed this is not possible any more, as the rpm binary from tumbleweed can't create a rpmdb in bdb format and the rpm binaries from sle12 or centos-7 can't open a rpmdb with the ndb format created during the bootstrap process. Also backporting the rpmdb from ndb to bdb seems to be impossible as the dump formats for the databases differ. A solution to this problem could be to to have an additional rpm_bdb binary in tumbleweed, which only is used for bootstrapping older linux distros. Is this sensible?

Not so much. To bootstrap old distros, one can (and perhaps should) just unpack the old rpms (specifically rpm.rpm & glibc etc.), then use that > in a chroot to initialize the rpmdb.

Exactly. That's what the build script does to be able to build packages for random distros. You can take a look at the "Preinstall" lines in /usr/lib/build/configs/ to see which packages are needed for the distribution you want to handle. cu Ludwig -- (o_ Ludwig Nussel //\ V_/_ http://www.suse.com/ SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH, GF: Felix Imendörffer HRB 36809 (AG Nürnberg)