Hello
A thought that is floating around in my head is to get rid of the separation
between 'tasks', 'scripts' and 'hooks' for OS-dependent stuff.
Specifically I'm talking about:
task extrbase
[ -f $target/etc/fstab ] || touch $target/etc/fstab
task debconf
task prepareapt
task updatebase
task instsoft
task configure
What bugs me is that there's a wall you're going to hit sooner or later. At
first it's pretty easy. You learn about class/ and disk_config/, files/ and
scripts/. That is all pretty nice and well. But then GRUB isn't working as
expected or fai is copying the wrong sources.list or something else and you
have to figure out what is actually done, where it is done and how to override
the default behavior.
Wouldn't it make more sense to forget about these tasks and provided the
functionality as scripts/? If you want to know how something os-specific is
done then it's _all_ in your config space. There's no more magic going on
behind the scene. If you want/need to override some default behavior then you
don't need to read about some magic entity called 'hooks'. You just take the
provided default script (optionally slap a classname onto it), perform the
change and you're done. If you don't need a task (e.g. debconf) then simply
delete it.
generic, OS-independent stuff -> /usr/lib/fai
OS-version specific stuff -> <config space>
If you want to install 2 different OS (versions) then you have the option to
provide different config spaces or to tweak your config space to support both
versions. It's no longer necessary to consider the relationship between the
FAI NFS-client's OS (version) and the actual installed client's OS (version).
e.g.: copy the sources.list to files/... and then use fcopy to pick the
correct file to copy to the install client instead of using the NFS client's
sources.list. Then you can dist-upgrade the FAI NFS client without suddenly
breaking your installed clients.
bye
thomas
