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[Andrew Stitt <afrayedknot AT thefrayedknot.armory.com>]

Development work for stage-root has completed. Big thanks to David Brown
for all his hard work on this project.

This was being done in the devel-stage-root branch, several people have
been using this already. We believe that its ready for a wider audience
and I will merge it into devel sorcery tomorrow evening (PST). This is
just an FYI email.

For those of you who aren't familar with the latest developments in the
project I'll summarize: First we tried installwatch 7, which has a staging
feature. Unfortunatly due to glibc implementation details installwatch is
"leaky". Even the installwatch we've been using throughout smgl history
is leaky. It just matters more when you're actively protecting the
real system. We made every effort to fix these problems, but were
ultimately told by the glibc developers "too bad", glibc simply is not
designed to work that way, and will not be modified in the foreseeable
future to accomidate that type of usage. So, we looked for other solutions
and considered a number of options. The best solution we found was
a fuse based filesystem for staging. You can get this by casting the
"castfs" spell.

-Andrew