For a container, we usually want an entire functioning system, minimal as possible, but not for example any kernel or modules or grub or udev, but do want at least a partly populated /dev.

And of course in the case of LXC, containers that aren’t full systems but just specific apps or services are also part of the defined design goal. Perhaps this osc trick is very close to whats needed for those kinds of containers at least.

For full system LXC containers, currently I use
zypper -R $CR ar -f http://host/…/repo/oss/ oss
zypper -R $CR in -lt pattern base

Preceded and followed by several manual tweaks.
(Which I wrote up at http://en.opensuse.org/LXC)

It works but it’s a drag where several things must be done manually and remembered and gotten just right every time, manually… OpenVZ web site has template filesystem tars already hand crafted but that’s cheating, not solving the problem, merely making someone else (vs. a tool) do the work.

Unfortunately the zypper approach seems to only work for very simple cases. For example it will not create any entries in /dev and this will cause a number of packages to fail to install. Also zypper doesn’t install things in the right order so users and groups are not created early and rpm re-owns files in packages if the owner / group can’t be found. You could script around these problems but eventually you’d realize that osc build already scripted around them for you.

1. with osc you always get the minimal build env installed as well.

2. it’s much easier with plain zypper:

zypper -R /chail/postfix -D /etc/zypp/repos.d in postfix

installs postfix & it’s deps into /chail/postfix. OTOH it still installs quite some stuff one doesn’t need.

JFYI