# $Id$

Licensing
========================

Originally, Catalyst was copyrighted by the Gentoo Foundation, Inc. and was
released under the terms of the GNU General Public License v.2.1.  Since this
is a fork of that project, all new code is no longer copyrighted to the Gentoo
Foundation.  Currently, copyright is held by the individual authors for their
contributions.  For more information, please consult COPYING.

Disclaimer
========================

This software is covered by no warranty or guarantee of functionality.  It is
provided to the public for use in creating source-based distributions in a
simple and reproducable manner.  Use at your own risk.

Requirements
=======================

- Python 2.4 or greater (may still work with 2.3)
- An ebuild repository snapshot (or an ebuild tree to create one)
- A generic stage3 tarball for your architecture
- shash for digest support

What is catalyst?
========================

Catalyst is a release building tool, used by Gentoo Linux. With catalyst,
you are able to completely customize your Gentoo install by customizing
the very tools that are used to install a system. Official Gentoo Linux release
media is built with catalyst.

Catalyst is capable of:

- Building installation stages
- Building bootable LiveCDs
- Building GRP (Gentoo Reference Platform) sets
- Setting up a Tinderbox target for test building
- Building netboot images

Configuring catalyst
========================

After emerging/installing catalyst, the first (and probably only) thing
that you will have to do is edit /etc/catalyst/catalyst.conf to your liking.

If you are not using an ebuild for the installation, you should create a
/etc/catalyst directory, and copy catalyst.conf and catalystrc from the
distribution tarball's files directory.

Example catalyst.conf:

distdir="/usr/portage/distfiles"
options="pkgcache kerncache"
sharedir="/usr/lib/catalyst"

There are many more options that can be set, but those defaults are good
for out of the box operation. For more documentation on what you can do
with catalyst, please check the man page or the online documentation at
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/releng/catalyst.