On Tuesday 21. May 2019 23.29.43 Paul Boddie wrote: > > I can't judge what is conservative or not, but the first thing I thought of > was this: > > https://wiki.debian.org/vmdebootstrap
It appears that it now has a successor: http://git.liw.fi/vmdb2 > And, of course, it is deprecated. Good thing I never paid it any attention > when people were talking it up! More here: > > https://wiki.debian.org/SystemBuildTools So, in the context of the makesd script... http://projects.goldelico.com/p/gta04-makesd/ ...I had a look at what kind of tools might also do the same job. The tasks makesd appears to do are as follows: * Downloads pre-built bootloader, device tree, kernel, modules, root filesystems * Partitions a disk according to device expectations * Formats filesystems * Unpacks or copies the different payloads into their destinations Not wanting to spend weeks looking at this, I briefly looked at the following: ELBE - https://elbe-rfs.org/docs/sphinx/article-elbeoverview-en.html Seems very powerful, but is also rather heavy, needs to use virtual machine technology, has a verbose XML configuration language. isar - https://github.com/ilbers/isar Seems to be oriented towards building root filesystems, delegates image generation and other such tasks to other tools, needs qemu. FAI - https://fai-project.org/ Seems powerful for its intended use but overkill and maybe not even completely appropriate for the more modest goals being considered here. Also needs qemu. Boxer - https://wiki.debian.org/Boxer Since Jonas is the author and maintainer of the software and Debian package, he can correct me on my impressions. This appears to be a framework for performing system configuration tasks, maybe even deployment, but the Debian source package doesn't seem to contain much of immediate use (at least to my eyes). Meanwhile, I took a closer look at makesd itself. It seems like a very capable script but is also rather complicated. Out of curiosity, I wanted to see if I could break it up into smaller pieces that are easier to inspect and maintain. Consequently, I ended up rewriting functionality, investigating some awkward issues with sfdisk, and generally spending more time on doing all of this than is perhaps worthwhile. Still, my ongoing efforts can be found here: https://hg.boddie.org.uk/remakesd Eventually, I will get round to looking at more substantial things, of course. Paul _______________________________________________ Community mailing list [email protected] http://lists.goldelico.com/mailman/listinfo.cgi/community http://www.tinkerphones.org
