Hi folks, I'm trying to solicit comments on what people are using for development environments and how well it's working. Here are some situations I imagine are common:
1. workstation running sid I've followed this model for over a decade. It works well, in general, and I keep up with development well enough that I can fix problems when they arise. However, it tends to lead to a certain amount of cruft over the years. Moreover, it's not really appropriate for a laptop or a situation in which Internet access isn't readily available to fix problems. I'm hoping to move away from that model. 2. workstation running squeeze or lenny I'm enjoying squeeze on my laptop and am considering switching my workstations to it. That, of course, means I will still need a sid environment somewhere for building. It also means that there are times when the packages I build for sid will not be installable on my workstation, which could be annoying. On the other hand, breakage should be more rare. It will require some solution for sid, though. 2a. pbuilder pbuilder, or some other chroot such as schroot, can help. In theory, it is a good plan. I don't have to dedicate a lot of RAM to it. The problem is that a chroot doesn't establish terribly strict separation from the main environment. Despite promises to the contrary, I've had weird things happen; for instance, an MTA, database server, or some other daemon process might try to fire up from within the chroot, which can result in highly confusing situations. I am therefore somewhat uncomfortable with this prospect. The ability to easily rebuild a chroot is appealing. However, I do not have a fast mirror at home; my "broadband" connection is just barely broadband. pbuilder highly recommends a local or a fast mirror. So I am concerned about this approach for security reasons as well. 2b. Xen, KVM, qemu, or VirtualBox The advantage of this approach is that it provides more complete isolation from the host workstation. I need not worry about it firing up a second copy of cron, for instance. On the other hand, it will have less perfect integration with the host environment (though NFS and ssh could probably let me write a script like pdebuild). It will also consume more resources, and especially more RAM and disk space, neither of which can be as easily scaled up and down in this setup. There is qemubuilder, but it seems to not support KVM, alas. Suggestions? -- John -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/4bb13fb4.4070...@complete.org