Getting playful

I've been experimenting with extracting PC-BSD PBI on FreeBSD; mainly because I would like to do a little postmortem analysis on a couple of PBI's, to see if the "Officially sanctioned" PBI Developers are still following the rules.


The process is actually a lot simpler then I thought it would be, the only problem is doing it in a chroot lol. Already more then 200MB in files in /tmp/chroot, and I've found that PBI must "assume" the presence of a lot of shit, because it will segfault if even simple things like awk or whoami are missing, let along bigger things 8=), what ever happened to error checking? But anyway, it's a fairly easy thing to sort out, even with having to take a fair number of libraries and programs into the chroot, in order to fool the thing into -extract'ing. So far, I've only hit one snag:

/home/0/.PBItmp/.pbistart: ./PBI: not found

which I have not figured out yet.


I think I've also found the origin of one of the more stupid elements of the PBC Sh API, and it seems to reflect the PBI sub systems source, judging by what I see in PC-BSDs Subversion >_>. It also reminds me, that some people seem to have never heard of a symbolic constant in their entire lives.... which also explains a few other things about the PBI Creation process and PC-BSD in general. Since PC-BSD, unlike a *real* BSD system, does not believe in documenting anything. I've had to go straight to the (also undocumented) source for answers, it also temps me to write a detailed review and commentary - but I'll keep my mouth shut for now. The number of people they will probably buttfuck in the long run is their own concern, I've already left. I'm not really interested in shifting through several thousand lines of intermixed Bourne, Bourne Again, and C++ code just to audit a few PBI; let some other poor schlep, eh Good Samaritan deal with this schlockware.



If my post doesn't make it obvious by now, the reasons why I was conducting the tests within a chroot environment, rather then sparing myself the trouble -> I wouldn't let the PC-BSD developers, or most peoples PBI touch one of my systems with a ten-thousand foot cattle prod, and I don't have time for setting up a jail. That is the kind of feelings I've got for the project, after using PC-BSD for years; now OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and NetBSD on the other hand, them I trust... and have seen the resulting work to warrant it lol.


- A strict son of a bitch.