Should Fedora revisit the idea having "one " image to be used across the cloud providers?

[Kashyap Chamarthy]

On 06/27/2013 01:01 PM, Collins, Robert (HPCS) wrote:
> Hey (and sorry about the top posting, Outlook - eesh.

Np. Unsolicited friendly suggestion - try thunderbird :)

> 
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/diskimage-builder/+bug/1182722 - Yes, we looked at Oz, and its a great tool for running installers, but that isn't what diskimage-builder does: we customise images.

Ok. (Now, I recall the proof-of-concept thread from openstack-dev, and the ensuing
discussions).

> So a typical debootstrap might take 10 to 15 minutes : we build an equally vanilla image in 1-2 minutes. Oz has all the complexity of dealing with Windows and other esoteric operating systems

Noted. 'debootstrap' reminds me of 'supermin' (similar for Fedora, written by Rich. Jones)

 http://libguestfs.org/supermin.8.html

"Supermin is a tool for building supermin appliances.  These are tiny
appliances (similar to virtual machines), usually around 100KB in
size, which get fully instantiated on-the-fly in a fraction of a
second when you need to boot one of them."

I did a quick test previously:

  http://kashyapc.fedorapeople.org/virt/openstack/supermin-fedora-appliance-building.txt

>From a quick 'grep' through d-i-b sources, I don't see mention of 'supermin'. Maybe I
should read more.

> we do Linux and only things that can run in a chroot : so a much simpler and lighter weight tooling. Easy to debug (just drop into a shell), easy to customise (write some shell in a well known environment).

Ok, I'm yet to try disk-image-biulder to understand how it creates things. I'm just giving
diskimage-builder a spin on my F19 machine.

(I personally am not really keen on windows either :) )

> 
> http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2013-April/007185.html for instance is one thread about this on openstack-dev.

Ah, right, I followed that thread but the content of your response slipped out my head.

Right, some merits/demerits of using installer-based (anaconda/kickstart) / upstream-base
iamge based.


Thanks for your response.


-- 
/kashyap