Philipp Riegger wrote:
Good morning,
I have some ideas for Summer of Code which i'd like to discuss with you.
I'm mostly interested in making GNAP usable and my proposal includes
lots of tasks in GNAP and catalyst, of which i'd like to finish as many
as possible and do some research on the rest.
catalyst tasks:
• Squashfs snapshot support
I don't like it, that it takes so much time to unpack a new snapshot and
it takes so much disk space to store it. Plan is: distribute tree
snapshots as squashfs images, mount them directly into the workdir,
use /mnt/distfiles and /mnt/packages instead of snapshot subdirectories.
Eh, I've never found unpacking a new snapshot to be all that cumbersome. While
it probably wouldn't take much to implement this, I don't like the idea. At
least, I'd never use it, since it would remove the ability to poke around in the
snapshot_cache.
• (Squashfs seedstage support)
Maybe the same is possible for stages? A future plan for this could be
to mount the squashfs image directly and use unionfs for the real work,
but i have no idea how deleting files in such a setup works. Research is
necessary here.
This isn't really feasible.
• uclibc-cross-compiling support
Cross compiling is hard, but it should be possible to build arch-uclibc
from arch. Research, what needs to be done combined with the
implementation, if possible. This would also make GNAP more flexible.
If you want a uclibc stage, use a profile that has uclibc as the default
virtual/libc provider.
• Documentation
In an email from some days ago i read, that documentation is planed for
after the release. I could support this and proofread it, since i need
the knowledge anyway.
It's planned for some time in the future when the people who have the knowledge
to write the documentation find the time and motivation.
• (Code cleanups)
I write this everywhere, but since i need a basic understanding, i have
to read (parts of) the source and maybe i find something worth
improving.
Catalyst is definitely in need of code cleanups. However, that's just a result
of a codebase that's changed hands multiple times over many years. We do random
cleanups already as we encounter code that needs it.
• Cross compiling research
This is the continuation of the uclibc stuff with some plans on what
could be done how.
Like I said on IRC, this is vapier's territory.
• Non-root builds research
Wouldn't it be nice if being root was not necessary for using catalyst?
I would like to look into the possibilities there and what is needed to
make it reality.
Mostly, this would require the ability to do "random" bind-mounts and chroot.
The only "sane" way to do this is to make catalyst suid root.
--
Andrew Gaffney http://dev.gentoo.org/~agaffney/
Gentoo Linux Developer Catalyst/Installer + x86 release coordinator
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