[Fedora-livecd-list] related to 6/7, mayflower loop device cleanup proposal

[Douglas McClendon]

Jeremy,

Now that you're into the guts of genMinInstDelta (patch 6/7), maybe this 
topic is very timely-

I've recently (like finished this morning) done a personal rewrite of 
the functionality of mayflower.  Setting asside why I did that, here is 
a proposal/notation relating that 6/7 patch.


All those hard coded (117/118/119/120/121) loop devices used are very ugly.

Probably they should get replaced with dynamic choices via losetup -f, 
as my recent livecd-creator patch did (though it was already using 
dynamic via losetup -a prior, different issue).

I think I can put together a patch that does this.  Will probably even 
look pretty slick, as they info would get conveyed via udev rules 
dynamically generated in mayflower-init (just like existing loop120 and 
loop121 rules, but based on dynamic rather than hard-coded loop devices).

The other thing, is I seemed to notice that, at least for my test cases, 
the mknod-s of the /dev/loop??? devices in the mayflower-initramfs seem 
unnecessary, as udev seems to create them just fine.  Anybody (david? 
jeremy?) know of why they are perhaps needed?

I know you mentioned Jeremy, about merging mayflower into mkinitrd.  In 
fact, that is one reason why I did the rewrite, as I need for it to 
remain runnable as non-root.  You should probably get mkinitrd that way 
too, but...?  But my point is that it's still probably good to do these 
cleanups to mayflower, as they will make the merge into mkinitrd that 
much easier/better.

Just an idea...  And I will post that rewrite soon enough, in case other 
parts of it are useful idea fodder...

-dmc