[Fedora-livecd-list] List of previous issues with livecd-tools which should be addressed

[Richard Shaw]

On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 1:19 AM, Jasper Hartline
<jasper.hartline at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 7:56 PM, Richard Shaw <hobbes1069 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> It's probably overkill but I know there's the optparse module for
>> passing arguments and options. Not really necessary since the script
>> requires exactly 3 arguments but it would add somewhat automagically
>> things like --help and --version.
>
> Right, these should be added.

I can help there (when I have time) if it's not something you're
familiar with, but I would rather wait for any updates you're already
thinking about to make the 'patch' easier.

>> Is there any difference between os.stat().st_size and os.path.getsize()?
>
> Not one I can think of, they both would require the os module.
> Maybe there is something better in Python 2.7

I did some research in the python docs and there isn't any difference
but it recommended the os.path method unless you're trying to get more
than one attribute of a file to prevent multiple stat() calls.

>> Do we care if one of the argument references is a symbolic link? I
>> think it's just personal preference in coding style but I tend to use
>> more high level functions like os.path.isfile() versus os.stat()
>
> I just threw it together, so little things like that can and need to be changed.

I think it needs to be changed to os.path.getsize(). I tried os.stat()
on a directory and as I expected it returned true. Some other checking
may also be a good idea, like is it an ISO. I'm not sure how you prove
that but checking for a .iso extension would be easy.

>> It looks like as this is a largely procedural style script that there
>> is some things done twice (once for the 32bit image and once for the
>> 64bit image) which could be generalized in a function.
>
> That is true. I will see if I can do some more hacking on it..
> Any patches are welcome.

I'll see what I can do.

[SNIP]

> I need to see where I am faouling up because it seems livecd-iso-to-disk
> is stepping on my partition table from --reset-mbr and --format command.
>
> Take a look at this:
> http://autopsy.liveprojects.info/repo/SOURCES/c-section/live_generator/install-boot.sh
> Just Edit -> Find in this page -> "kpartx"
>
> That is a way to use dmsetup and kpartx (device mapper)
> to actually make the loop device have partitions which we are more
> used to using.
>
> I think my offset into the original file is off in the second loop device setup.

I checked out the link and it obviously uses a lot of shell commands.
I think at some point a shell script would be better than a bunch of
subprocess calls, however, I think much of it could be mitigated by
using modules that allow us to get the same result without the
subprocess calls. I haven't had time to check it out, but I saw a
reference to pyparted which might allow us to do the 'partitioning' of
the lodev natively.

Richard