On Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 5:49 PM, Daniel Drake <d...@laptop.org> wrote: > On 24 November 2010 22:40, Kevin Gordon <kgordon...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Is this recommendation against yum and rpm for all software, or just the >> oplc repo packages, the kernel and the firmware? I'm certainly happy doing >> just safe builds for the core. > > To avoid all corner cases it the recommendation really needs to be > "everything" > In reality, you'll probably get away with it, especially because > you're only really working with added packages in your deployment (not > upgrading ones that are already installed). > > Some of the resultant problems will also not affect small deployments > like yours. For example, one side effect is that olpc-update pristine > (efficient) updates stop working as soon as you make any filesystem > modifications like this. Another side effect is that your > custom-installed packages will magically disappear after an > olpc-update upgrade (which in a real deployment would happen without > you even knowing). > > But in a small deployment like yours, touching each laptop for updates > is probably more sensible than the knowledge and infrastructure > investment needed for hands-off olpc-update, so you aren't affected. > >> However, as part of our 'refresh' stick when we wipe and install a new >> signed build, we generally also include the necessary rpm's for cheese and a >> couple of other utilities that are locally installed from the USB stick >> using a bash script; or, for the Vernier software dependencies, the >> dependent rpm's are installed by means of a python script. However, they >> are rpm's and they are downloaded onto the stick (the first time) using yum, >> and they are then installed from the stick using --localinstall from the >> stick. > > You probably won't see any problem with this collection of changes. > Nevertheless, at the SF summit I started showing Adam the "correct" > way to do this: building a custom OS image with those customizations > already included. We didn't have time to completely finish it, but he > picked it up quickly and could probably finish it with a little effort > (and perhaps a couple of mails to this list).
At one point Michael and I also had a side-loading mechanism implemented -- if you put your target RPMs in some directory in /home/olpc -- I think it was ~/.rpms -- then they'd automatically get re-installed after olpc-update. That was (at the time) the preferred mechanism for "adding a few packages" persistently to a build. Assuming this mechanism hasn't code-rotted, this is a nice intermediate step: less work than rolling an entire new build, and relatively easy to accomodate new "upstream" builds without disruption. --scott -- ( http://cscott.net/ ) _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel