livemedia-creator and the fedora build system [was Re: appliance-creator: how can I ...]

[Seth Vidal]

On Mon, 12 Nov 2012, Dennis Gilmore wrote:

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> El Sat, 10 Nov 2012 11:12:20 -0500
> Matthew Miller <mattdm at fedoraproject.org> escribió:
>> On Fri, Nov 09, 2012 at 07:25:35PM -0800, Brian C. Lane wrote:
>>> I think appliance-creator is pretty much unsupported at this point,
>>> isn't it?
>>
>> Yes, so moving to ami-creator might be a good choice.
>>
>>> livemedia-creator is supposed to replace livecd-creator,
>>> appliance-creator and ami-creator, although it hasn't seen much
>>> testing for the last 2 cases it does have code that may work :) It
>>> is part of the lorax package.
>>
>> I'm told by Fedora release engineering folks that we can't use that
>> -- the builders run in VMs, so virt-install isn't an option, and since
>> livemedia-creator is based around that, it's not available to us.
>
> Its not available because ive not yet worked out the magic to be able
> to create a chroot with the target bits i.e. f18 and run
> livemedia-creator in the chroot and have it spin up a vm and do the
> install etc and work as it needs to. Its a case of where the tool was
> written without thought for the requirements on how it would be run.
> we have dedicated physical hardware for building the images on. thats
> not at all the issue. either im not clear in how i explain things or
> people are only half listening.
>
>
>> We could maybe engineer an alternate build process using the internal
>> cloud, adapting livecd creator to run on a cloud instance rather than
>> with virt locally. Or something. Any ideas?
>>
>>
>> On another note, Boxgrinder also is based around appliance creator,
>> and it'd be nice to play nicely with those people too.
>
> Boxgrinder is not a viable option at all.

agreed - if for any reason than too many moving parts and a giant software 
stack behind it.

Dennis,
  ami-creator is what I've been using to make imgs for euca and I know it 
will work for ec2 imgs (provided you have a kernel/ramdisk which works 
with xen)

And ami-creator only requires a dead-standard stock kickstart file. (well 
you have to do various things in %post to make the img work when it is 
spun up in an instance but that's nothing different than normal 
kickstarty-ness.

-sv