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I just have an active question about building a chroot-environment.

The main-question is, if there is an existing script...

Now it looks like some sysadmins already tried things but got stuck somewhere.

If I compare that to programmers you seem to be able to find a ready library for almost anything.

What makes us sysadmins so different from programmers?

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    To the extent that your question is valid, because I bill by the hour. However, it's not particularly valid, and seems to be based on incorrect assumptions about both programmers and SAs.
    – HopelessN00b
    Oct 20, 2012 at 21:40
  • Please read How can I ask better questions on Server Fault?
    – Michael Hampton
    Oct 20, 2012 at 21:48
  • I interpreted that question as a shopping question because you're really asking for a product, which is off topic.
    – John Gardeniers
    Oct 21, 2012 at 0:31

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There is no difference, the not-invented-here build-my-own is just as common for software developers. For example, do a search and tell me how many different XML/HTML parsing libraries you can find. Then look on stack overflow and see how many questions you see people asking about how to parse HTML with a fricken regex.

There are lots of tools for building chroot environments. For example on a Debian-based system I would use Debootstrap, but there are many other similar tools. But there is no perfect tool that works for every distro, and every person. Plus people look at these tools that try to be generic, and find that they are more complex, which they have to be to provide the required flexibility for a generic tool. So they decide to build their rather then spend time learning.

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  • Good example. So basically you think sysadmins and software programmers are in a comparable position. This is a great relief - although it seems to make it a common IT-problem.
    – Nils
    Oct 21, 2012 at 19:12
  • It's more likely to be a people-problem than a technical-folks problem. The parsing libraries example is very apropos, but my personal favorite example is terminal applications.
    – gWaldo
    Oct 23, 2012 at 14:11

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