On Mon, 9 Nov 2015 22:02:35 -0700 Tim Flink tflink@redhat.com wrote:
As we get closer to putting disposable clients into production, we need a way to have updated images for those clients. I don't think this is news to anyone since the topic has come up several times before but now there's a bit more urgency :)
In my mind, we have the following requirements:
- Produces qcow2 images that work with testcloud
- can be run in an automated way
- allows adding/changing/customizing packages contained in image
- allows arbitrary repos to be specified
and the following "nice to have" things:
- can build branched and rawhide images
- builds images from scratch using only things provided by releng
- written in python
- builds more than qcow2 for some future-proofing
- can run well in a VM
Is there anything that I missed?
As far as I know, we're looking at two options right now: taskotron-vmbuilder and imagefactory. I've put together a list of the pros and cons that I know of for both tools. Thoughts on which direction to take would be appreciated.
After talking with adam more about how openqa works, it turns out that there is a significant overlap between what we need for taskotron images and the installed images that openqa uses for some of its tests.
From what I can see, it would make sense to have one tool which is capable of creating images for both system. I'm not sure it makes sense to support non-installed image creation (ks, update, shrink and the other bare disks), though.
I'll add on what I can think of for what I can see in the openqa image creation but more feedback from the folks who've dealt with it more than I have would be appreciated.
Requirements: - make post-install changes to the images before distribution - specify partition table type - create users on the image
Are there other requirements for openqa images? Any thoughts on whether it makes sense to look into doing both images in the same place?
Tim