ezjail

_{Son of a bitch, posted this to /comp/, must need sleep.}

I'm starting to play with FBSD jails to see how they compare to Solaris zones. Anyway, after seeing the praise for ezjail on desu~x3.org, giving it a try. Do I really have to download every src package?

cd: can't cd to /usr/src/games/fortune/strfile
*** Error code 2
...
make world failed.

Installed games, now it wants GNU. BSD mixed with GNU, I'd stick with my Mac if I wanted that.

>>1
Yes, you have to not only download the entire base sources, but you have to compile them all. You have to remember that you're setting up a completely separate environment to effectively run a separate instance of FreeBSD, save the kernel (because that's how ezjail works). It's got to get the userland bits and pieces from somewhere.

You can use jails in a much more lightweight manner (since they're simply an implementation of an isolated process space), but you end up with doing a lot of the same things ezjail does.

The FreeBSD paradigm involves a lot of compilation. Most people update their sources (for both kernel and world) from CVS every so often, and that generally involves rebuilding the kernel and parts of the world (as per /usr/src/UPDATING). As such, it's not typically a big deal for most users (and ezjail can piggyback off it's infrastructure for system installation), but I can see how you'd be frustrated by it. You only have to do it once.

Wait until you have to wait 4 hours for GHC to bootstrap itself :(

It must have downloaded a compiler all on its own; because even as shitty as sysinstall is, I'm sure I never selected that.
BSD /= Linux. The base system is self-hosting and ships with gcc (and everything you'd need to compile the base). This makes building the world even more fun because you have to wait for gcc to bootstrap.

I've personally never used Solaris (much less Zones), but from what I've read they're functionally equivalent to jails (especially now that ZFS is in the tree, which means you can manipulate mountpoints from within a jail on FreeBSD). Zones are probably much less of a pain in the ass to set up though.