[Fedora-livecd-list] Virt-p2v live CD, comments and packaging

[Richard W.M. Jones]

Jeremy Katz wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-02-04 at 19:05 +0000, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
>> I'm posting here to see if anyone has any comments about the way I did 
>> this live CD.  The kickstart script uses a rather complex %post section, 
>> which adds a few files to the filesystem, instead of building RPMs or 
>> modifying existing RPMs.
> 
>>From a maintainability point of view, you're going to be happier in the
> long run if you actually package up things into RPMs as opposed to just
> concatenating piles of scripts.  I've already gotten pretty frustrated
> with just the initscript we're using in the desktop case on a few
> occasions.

So there are two genuine issues with using RPMs:

(1) I need to replace existing files -- in particular I need a new 
/etc/inittab.  AIUI to do this with RPMs would involve building a custom 
'initscripts' RPM and maintaining it, but let me know if I've got that 
wrong.

(2) I'd like users to be able to download the source tarball and do:

   ./configure
   make

to build an ISO.  However the intermediate step -- building RPMs -- 
requires a full RPM build root inside the user's home directory, so 
they'd need to set that up and create the ~/.rpmmacros file, and specify 
where it is to ./configure.  Again, that's AIUI, please correct me if 
I'm wrong.

>> I've also investigated how to attach stuff to the end of the ISO image, 
>> and the way I've come up with allows me to update an ISO with a new 
>> script quite easily, and much more quickly than waiting for 
>> livecd-creator to rerun.  This great (a) for rapid development and (b) 
>> to send new updates to users without forcing them to download another 
>> 170 MB ISO.
> 
> Ewwww :)

OK funny, but there's a genuine reason for doing this.

P2V is extremely difficult to test; I'd like to compare it to debugging 
software in outer space.  In all cases where someone has reported a bug 
to me I've had no access to the hardware, and no way to build comparable 
hardware at home (often it's because they're using some oddball SCSI 
controller or RAID array).  I'm relying on a third party to give me as 
many details as possible.  I then run the program through on paper to 
see if there are any scenarios which would give rise to the same bug.  I 
then make a small change to the script, and send them another ISO to test.

The problem is that it takes an hour and a half to upload a 170MB ISO, 
and another 15 minutes for the third party to download it.

The only change may be a couple of lines in a 1,000 line script which I 
could send to them by email in seconds.

ISO attachments allow much more interactive testing.

Rich.

-- 
Emerging Technologies, Red Hat - http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/
Registered Address: Red Hat UK Ltd, Amberley Place, 107-111 Peascod
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