Plans for DVD-ROM image?

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Tom 'Needs A Hat' Mitchell <mitch48 at sbcglobal.net> said:
> I think the better strategy will be a community authored script that
> takes the set of existing iso images and assembles them into a single
> DVD image.

There is already a script from a Red Hat employee that does this.  It
might could use some clean up (although I haven't looked at it lately).

I think it could also be made to require less time and disk space.  I
use loopback mounts to mount the CDs, generate a symlink tree to those
files, then use the "-f" option to mkisofs to follow the links - this
way, I don't need any more disk space than what the CD and DVD images
take, and it runs faster too because it doesn't have to copy the CD
image contents to disk first.

The only thing you have to watch out for is that by default you can only
have 8 loopback mounts; adding "options loop max_loop=16" to
/etc/modules.conf (in FC1 anyway) solves that.

> The advantage of this is that the RH guys only need
> to get the CDROMs correct.  Someone else can be responsible 
> for the repackaging.... ;-) to a DVD.

The only problem I see with distributing a DVD made from RH CD images is
validation (i.e. that the content hasn't been changed since Red Hat
authored it).  With the CD images, you can compare MD5 sums to the RH
signed file, and the RPMs themselves are PGP signed.  That leaves the
boot.iso file (and PXE boot files) and Fedora/base/* files (as well as
READMEs, RELEASE-NOTES, etc.) unsigned and unvalidated.

I'd like to see something to validate those as well.  Maybe just an
MD5SUMS file at the top that has the MD5 of all of the non-PGP-signed
files on the CD (or maybe sums/MD5SUMS.disc1, sums/MD5SUMS.disc2, etc.,
but I think the non-RPM files on discs 2-X are the same as the files on
disc 1), and then have the MD5SUMS file(s) PGP signed.

I thought about this some when I was building my own DVD image, and I
opened Bugzilla #117647.
-- 
Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.