>> Does pilgrim (Puritan?) use "kickstart" like files? > > Nope. > >> If not, why do we not create builds using what seems to be fedora's >> standard build system? > > The short answer is that there has never been consensus among the people > dealing with OLPC's builds that anaconda was the right tool for the job.
I think also that alot of the automated tools that are now used to build the various Fedora stuff (mock / koji / livecd-tools / appliance-tools) wouldn't have been around when OLPC was first looking for a build system > The longer answer involves a lot of politics which I'm /really/ not > interested in stirring up but which are unavoidable if you want to > really understand how things came to be the way that they are. In order > to navigate this quandary, I'm going to offer you a series of > thought-questions which, I hope, will lead you to your own answer to > your question. No argument there. > (If you want, you can ask me tomorrow for my answers to them but you > should try to construct your own answers first.) > > Hope this helps, > > Michael > > --------- > > a) Requirements. > > 1. What do you think a build system for OLPC and for XOs needs to do? Simplistically build a working bootable OLPC system, but to do that it is required to deal with the boot system, filesystems, storage, security, signing etc of all of the above. > 2. What explorations have been made in the area of XO-related build > systems? I think the major differences between a standard Fedora system and an OLPC system WRT a build system is the underlying stuff like the boot (lack of BIOS, security etc), the filesystems used, and OLPC security related stuff. > 3. What lists of requirements (or audiences) do each of these > explorations seem to be trying to satisfy? a lot of them, and a mostly moving target as the project matures and so do the tools around it. > b) History & Incumbency of Pilgrim. > > 1. Why did davidz write pilgrim? At a guess because the likes of livecd-tools and appliance-tools either didn't exist or were mature enough to meet the needs of OLPC at the time they were required. > 2. Why did pilgrim not use anaconda? Didn't meet the current requirements of OLPC at the time. Probably a number of other reasons to do with politics and various other related issues with the size/complexity of it because it handles everything from a server to a netbook running on a platform of i386 right through PPC and IA-64 from a small amount of RAM to terabytes and everything else most of which isn't an issue to OLPC which runs on essentially a single piece of hardware. > 3. Why did davidz later write livecd-tools using anaconda? > > 4. What do you have to do in order to get OLPC to use a different > build system? A lot of work and testing for regressions. > c) People & Politics Not even going to try to answer these ones but no doubt they change with time and what is relevant now has probably changed someone since the beginning. Peter _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
