Build a gentoo stage1 tarball without catalyst

I've written a script that will generate a Gentoo stage1 tarball without catalyst. It basically emerges packages.build to /tmp/stage1root (much like catalyst). But rather on relying on a stage3 tarball to generate the stage1 as catalyst does, my script will use your current system compiler, binutils, glibc, etc to build it. One could also use this within a chroot also.

For example, I downloaded the Gentoo stage3-i686-2005-r1.tar.bz2. I then untarred, mounted, then chrooted into it. From there, I upgraded my compiler to gcc 4.1, binutils to 2.16-r1, and glibc to 2.3.90 (Conrad Method 8.3) . I then use this script to generate a stage1 with the new toolchain. The resulting tarball can now be installed via the normal bootstrap.sh && emerge - e system method. All the overlay, /etc/portage, and make.conf stuff is already in the tarball. You may want to edit the make.conf to comment out the stage1 C{XX}FLAGS and uncomment the original system C{XX}FLAGS.

Anyway, I use it frequently so I figured others may find it of some use. Here is the script and ChangeLog . I'll probably be adding a non-interactive flag in the near future, so watch for the update ;)