Can one of the admins verify this patch?

@jvns, thanks for the documentation patch. We'll gladly take this and are interested in helping lowering the bar for newcomers! That said, I think there isn't a one-size-fits-all solution here. The rkt-builder needs rkt to build rkt itself and is burdensome for small debug/patch/check tasks, which is why we point people to the list of build-dependencies. Are you aiming at having a small development setup or a compact way for automated builds? May I ask how does your current/ideal environment look like?

So -- the reason I added this was that I couldn't figure out how to install the build dependencies on my Ubuntu 16.04 machine and so I wanted to download a build container instead. Why is the rkt builder burdensome? I noticed that it takes a really long time to build the first time (which seems normal), and when I build a second time it's not a lot faster, but I couldn't figure out why.

I see, thanks for the feedback.

how to install the build dependencies on my Ubuntu 16.04 machine

Are docs and scripts completely not working there, or just not advertised well enough? Admittedly they are not tailored to Ubuntu, but a recent Debian unstable should be quite closed to that.

Why is the rkt builder burdensome?

In the context of rapid local development, it throws away some flexibility and speed (I think you noticed the lack of incremental build) in favor of reproducibility. But I understand that this touches into personal preferences, so that above is just my partial view. Also, non-native speaker here, so excuse me if the wording was not super-clear.