Is Lxroot still being updated?

[d3-X-t3r]

Hi @parke, hope you're keeping well.

I see that the last commit to the repo here was two years ago. Are you still updating lxroot, if so, any chance of updating the code here please? I'm interested in trying out lxroot and also seeing what you've improved over the last couple of years (if there have been improvements).

Thank you.

[parke]

Hi, @d3-X-t3r,

Thanks for the question.

It appears I last made (unpublished) improvements to Lxroot in August of 2024.

Please read over the three most recent GitHub discussions (i.e. the descussions from 2023 and 2024). In those discussions, I describe some of the unpublished improvements. I may also have mentioned some of my plans for future improvements.

If you could briefly describe your use case(s) for Lxroot, I could also tell you whether or not I believe any of the unpublished improvements would be relevant to your use case.

[d3-X-t3r]

Thanks for responding so quickly!

My main use cases are a) for building applications in a clean/isolated environment b) testing applications in a sandbox c) having a lightweight "portable" dev environment of sorts where I have a minimal rootfs like Alpine with all my favorite tools.

For the last part, I find Docker/OCI images too complex, I do not like all their abstraction and layering and the whole "ecosystem" that comes with the - I just want everything to be contained in one directory that I can understand, and maybe compress into a tarball and take it around. Or maybe even turning it into a compressed SquashFS image or something which I can directly mount.

[parke]

My main use cases are a) for building applications in a clean/isolated environment b) testing applications in a sandbox c) having a lightweight "portable" dev environment of sorts where I have a minimal rootfs like Alpine with all my favorite tools.

You should be able to do all that with release 0.22.1.

If you want to share a directory (/home, for example) or multiple directories, between multiple chroot environments, then the unpublished improvements would probably be useful.

Similarly, given that SquashFS is read-only, the unpublished improvements would make it easier (IMO) to overlay some writable directories on top of a read-only root filesystem.

I definitely recommend reading: https://github.com/parke/lxroot/discussions/23

If you tell me what task you would like to accomplish first, I can tell you how much value the improvements will add to that task.

I'm willing to publish the updates, but probably without improved/complete documentation. So I would just write up a short guide targeting your specific task, rather than attempting to write full documentation. It may be several days before I have time to publish the updates.

At the same time, IMO, there is very little downside to you just trying to use version 0.22.1 and seeing how it goes.

Please let me know what you think.