[Fedora-livecd-list] PATCH: Disk (appliance) creator tool

[Douglas McClendon]

Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 16, 2008 at 11:18:58PM -0600, Douglas McClendon wrote:

>> Another reason why I like that pipeline breakdown, is because the sorts 
>> of things that go on in phase2process can even be largely distribution 
>> agnostic.  Combined with alternate phase1process plugins that support 
>> other distributions, and you get quite a flexible provisioning tool.
> 
> A significant part of the phase 2 procss is dealing with the bootloader
> and initrd setup which is far from distro-agnostic.

Well, livecd was just one of the multiple phase2process options I 
listed.  (others were push to a server, and instantiate as a virt host).

And even in the livecd case, I admit, there are significant differences, 
but it is actually quite an educational problem to refactor the distro 
specific differences and the things that are general to most distros.

For instance, I wrote my own initramfs init for fedora based on what I 
saw as the best features of both the existing livecd-tools version, and 
the very mature and flexible architecture that ubuntu's casper uses. 
The next addition I plan to make to it is to support unionfs 
copy-on-write for fedora, and then to support ubuntu/debian as bases.  I 
do not anticipate that this will actually be a terribly hard thing to do 
(for me, given my experience in the area).  For reference, my initramfs 
init is browsable here-

http://filteredperception.org/smiley/projects/viros/viros-0.5/tools/ZyX-Live-OS/live.init.html

But yes, definitely non trivial, but something I plan to have fun doing...

-dmc