On 02/06/2012 10:33 PM, Chris Tyler wrote:
But back to the original question: what's the optimal way to package an installable image? I see several valid options:
(1)- Per-platform image with MBR plus one or more partitions, with the last partition shipped as minimal length and resizable to fill the device (either at installation or firstboot).
(2)- Per-platform tarball, including a tarball for a boot partition (if applicable) plus a tarball of the rootfs, plus some sort of layout config file (XML? script?) that configures how the partitioning is set up.
(3)- Generic per-arch (armv5tel/armv7hl) rootfs tarball plus per-platform boot tarball, separately downloaded. (Nice to cache the rootfs if installing into multiple, different devices, but messy as far as RPM knowledge of what's on the boot partition).
I think having an easy installer is ultimately more important than which format we use. To get tens of thousands of people running Fedora on Raspis in the next six months, for example, we need a tool that's friendly, dirt-simple to use, and ideally runs on Windows as well as Fedora.
Speaking for a possible minority position here, I'd also like to see a solution that scales well for business customers looking to provision dozens to hundreds of notes with real SATA drives. A generic 2GB image intended for an SD-card is probably not going to fit the bill.
I don't see how anything other than option 3 is sustainable over any significant number of different platforms, though. So I'd want to see a resizable generic per-arch rootfs that is intended to be the last partition following 0 or more boot partitions that are platform specific.
--Mark Langsdorf Calxeda, Inc.