gentoo-go

little helper to build and add go to a gentoo stage3 tarball

Is this in any way an "official gentoo go image"?

no.

why all this tooling?

golang does not seem to like being build docker-in-docker -- it need to build in a priviledged run. This mini repo provides the tooling to do that: It takes a gentoo stage3 tarball and builds the most recent version of go on top of it. From there it should be possible to complete most use cases without the need for priviledged execution.

why bother at all as there are official golang docker images?

Reflections on trusting trust teaches us not to not trust binaries unconditionally. The intend is to provide a way to bootstrap the toolchain for go independant of the official golang binaries. This will not help against maliciuos code in the golang or gentoo source itself, but might one day help detect malicious code injected in the toolchain in those binaries. This is not to say these images are in any what "better" than the official ones. But if you are sufficiently paranoid, you can use these images to build and compare with a build from the official image of the same version and verify the result is the same.

Note that this build still has to rely on binaries, esp. gentoos stage3 and go-bootstrap package.

Is there any other benefit to these images?

You get a gentoo userspace that is ready to go. If you for any reason prefer that for your usecase over the Debian base of the "official" golang images, you are invited to take advantage of that. Note the build does not update gentoo packages to keep the diff to the stage3 small.

Where are the images produced by this?

The images can be found at https://hub.docker.com/r/bjoernmichaelsen/gentoo-go/tags.

What tags exist in the docker hub repo?

• latest: the last build (moving)
• goX.XX.X: the latest build with that go version (moving)
• nightly-XXXX-XX-XX: the build on that (stable)

how can I use this locally?

If you want to build the image locally, have a recent versions of GNU make, coreutils and docker installed. Then execute:

make

and it should build and tag you a stage3 tarball with an additional go pre-installed.

how big is the image?

At the time of writing, the stage3 tarball is 1.2GB. go currently adds some 400MB to that. Some 300MB are added by updating with (before building):

emerge --sync

As go builds static binaries, nothing from the build image will be deployed in most cases, so the layers have been left intact as keeping the history intact is considered more important.

Why this license?

The closest upstream of this are gentoos ebuild. Lacking a reason the divert from them I used GPLv3 for the tooling here too.