RCs for Everyone (was One (more) week slip of Fedora 11 Release)

[Bill Davidsen]

Chris Adams wrote:
> Once upon a time, Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com> said:
>   
>> Chris Adams wrote:
>>     
>>> Building an image isn't free in terms of CPU, RAM, or I/O.  Also, IIRC
>>> you can only build an image on the same arch as the target (e.g. my i686
>>> server can only build ix86 targets, not x86_64 or PPC).
>>>
>>>       
>> I'll take your word for that, although I have no idea why assembling parts 
>> into a whole would take any architecture dependent code. I make ISOs for 
>> PPC & Mac using x86 tools (mkisofs), so clearly it's a limitation rather 
>> than a requirement to build ISOs.
>>     
>
> Building ISOs is the last step of a many step process.  You have to
> build content to go _on_ the ISOs.  Setting up the boot images is arch
> specific.
>
>   
But that's the point, if you change a few packages, say on rawhide or 
updates, those get pushed to the mirrors, the mirrors build the ISO from 
the packages. The RPM build needs to be on the target machine, but after 
it's pushed it's just ones and zeros. So it takes minimal time to 
distribute a change, and mostly i/o to create the image, check the CRC 
on the image to be sure it's as expected, and start serving.

Fedora machine have to do the build anyway, I think the mirrors will 
have to take the changes anyway, so assembling the ISO would appear to 
be the part which you could distribute to sites willing to participate.

Thought: push that back one step and add a package to rawhide with a 
name like 'daily-jigdo-090821.rpm' which when installed would pull all 
the RPMs to build an ISO into some known place and create an install ISO 
ready for use. Because I test first on a VM (I but lots of people do), a 
full install using a kickstart is no big deal, and it positively 
prevents some bugfix I hacked up yesterday from causing an issue today. 
And if I want to install somewhere on bare iron, I can burn and install 
without worrying about how much network I need later for updates.

Call this approach the "daily spin" and move all the work to my machine, 
since people seem to have invented tons of reasons why it would be too 
much load on a mirror server. Feel free to substitute any other package 
for jigdo, the goal is to be able to really test the state of the art at 
some point in time. Dare I hope someone will at least discuss this for fc12?

-- 
Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>
  Even purely technical things can appear to be magic, if the documentation is
obscure enough. For example, PulseAudio is configured by dancing naked around a
fire at midnight, shaking a rattle with one hand and a LISP manual with the
other, while reciting the GNU manifesto in hexadecimal. The documentation fails
to note that you must circle the fire counter-clockwise in the southern
hemisphere.