[Fedora-livecd-list] Destructive behavior in --skipcopy option of livecd-iso-to-disk

[Frederick Grose]

On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 10:52 AM, Frederick Grose <fgrose at gmail.com> wrote:

> The --skipcopy option in livecd-iso-to-disk was implemented to aid
> testing and boot configuration file recovery (see
> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.livecd/2682).


Here is the original rationale for --skipcopy:

On 10/29/08 6:18 PM, Stewart Adam wrote:

> * Adds --skipcopy to skip copying the live OS

Oops, forgot to mention two things. I know this feature seems a little odd,
> so I wanted to explain a bit more... --skipcopy doesn't skip all copying,
> just the live OS, which makes it useful for testing the boot configuration.
> It's also useful for USB media, where testing over and over would normally
> be wasting limited write cycles; it takes a lot of waiting for the 700-MB
> file copy to finish. ALso, say the MBR gets lost or you've transferred the
> live OS files from a friend's key, you can just refresh the MBR and
> bootloader config instead without touching the live OS and persistent home.


I've filed a bug, https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=582051,
containing patches for the livecd-iso-to-disk.sh and .pod files.

I've found that it will overwrite both an existing persistent overlay and

home.img, if they exist.  This is unintentional destructive behavior.


> While it may seem that one wouldn't ask for a new overlay or home folder

AND skipcopy, during the testing of scripts, this is a reasonable scenario.



This is a piece of a project to enhance the livecd-iso-to-disk script for

the Sugar on a Stick customization kit project,


and it has the general benefit of making testing of the script easier during
development.

        --Fred
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