Feature proposal: Rebootless Installer

[Douglas McClendon]

Colin Walters wrote:
> Wait, so it's persisting any changes you made to the target drive?
> That sounds quite cool actually, and I misunderstood the original
> post.  Concretely with your change, if I've connected to a wireless
> network with NetworkManager, that would get saved in the target
> drive's configuration in gconf and be there next time I boot?
> 
> I know with the live images one problem we have is that data can sort
> of randomly disappear if you're running close to the memory limit; if
> we go with your architecture we should probably special-case things
> like ~/.gconf so say the Firefox http disk cache doesn't blow away
> your wireless config.

To help clarify the feature, let me try to clarify this last point of 
yours even more.  What you are saying is orthogonal to the new feature. 
  I.e. the fact that if you have been using a booted LiveOS long enough 
for the in-ram rootfs overlay to fill up, that Bad Things Happen (tm). 
Actually, there is no current or future case where a firefox http disk 
cache would blow away your wireless config.  What would happen, is that 
the firefox cache would simply cause the system to run out of ram (space 
in the rootfs overlay), and subsequently everything would just start 
failing badly.  I.e. it is not as you say that things randomly 
disappear, it is that attempts to write to the rootfs just start failing 
(in a way that confuses the OS even more than if the same thing happened 
due to 100% rootfs capacity).  So to mitigate this, you do things by 
making a firefox cache smaller.

But now, the important clarification to how this pertains to the 
zyx-liveinstaller:  If you complete installation before falling off of 
this cliff, there is no subsequent danger of hitting this problem.  The 
instant that the installation completes, all the ram or usbdisk that had 
been used for the rootfs overlay is released/unbound, and subsequently 
you are just dealing with your installed rootfs on disk like normal. 
(before even rebooting the first time...)

Hope that makes sense.

peace...

-dmc