On Tue, 2008-02-05 at 10:22 +0000, Richard W.M. Jones wrote: > Jeremy Katz wrote: > > On Mon, 2008-02-04 at 19:05 +0000, Richard W.M. Jones wrote: > >> I'm posting here to see if anyone has any comments about the way I did > >> this live CD. The kickstart script uses a rather complex %post section, > >> which adds a few files to the filesystem, instead of building RPMs or > >> modifying existing RPMs. > > > >>From a maintainability point of view, you're going to be happier in the > > long run if you actually package up things into RPMs as opposed to just > > concatenating piles of scripts. I've already gotten pretty frustrated > > with just the initscript we're using in the desktop case on a few > > occasions. > > So there are two genuine issues with using RPMs: > > (1) I need to replace existing files -- in particular I need a new > /etc/inittab. AIUI to do this with RPMs would involve building a custom > 'initscripts' RPM and maintaining it, but let me know if I've got that > wrong.
An entirely new inittab seems... overkill. Is an initscript to run your functionality not good enough? > (2) I'd like users to be able to download the source tarball and do: > ./configure > make > to build an ISO. However the intermediate step -- building RPMs -- > requires a full RPM build root inside the user's home directory, so > they'd need to set that up and create the ~/.rpmmacros file, and specify > where it is to ./configure. Again, that's AIUI, please correct me if > I'm wrong. --define _builddir, etc on the rpmbuild command line works. And you can then put it under a mktemp'd directory. > >> I've also investigated how to attach stuff to the end of the ISO image, > >> and the way I've come up with allows me to update an ISO with a new > >> script quite easily, and much more quickly than waiting for > >> livecd-creator to rerun. This great (a) for rapid development and (b) > >> to send new updates to users without forcing them to download another > >> 170 MB ISO. > > > > Ewwww :) > > OK funny, but there's a genuine reason for doing this. Sure, but it's going to be pretty fragile and I know I'd rather have something more dependable. Why not just use something like xdelta between isos? A little more time-consuming to create, but I suspect that time difference is already made up with the time you spent writing the ocaml script :-) Jeremy -- Fedora-livecd-list mailing list [email protected] https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-livecd-list
