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

[Jeremy Katz]

On Tue, 2008-02-05 at 10:22 +0000, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> 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.

An entirely new inittab seems... overkill.  Is an initscript to run your
functionality not good enough?

> (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.

--define _builddir, etc on the rpmbuild command line works.  And you can
then put it under a mktemp'd directory.

> >> 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.

Sure, but it's going to be pretty fragile and I know I'd rather have
something more dependable.  Why not just use something like xdelta
between isos?  A little more time-consuming to create, but I suspect
that time difference is already made up with the time you spent writing
the ocaml script :-)

Jeremy