[Fedora-livecd-list] pilgrim livecd work

[David Zeuthen]

(adding back fedora-desktop-list as that Cc: field mysteriously
vanished.)

On Wed, 2006-09-20 at 03:05 -0500, Jasper Hartline wrote:
> You really should use the stock Fedora Core utilities however.
> If you are making an installer to system from LiveCD, why not use Anaconda?

I'd rather ask; Why use anaconda? At the end of the day, installation is
a pretty basic task

 - yum install what you want
 - write out some configuration files
 - perform other post-installation configuration.

So, you know, I'd hate to replace < 100 lines of code by depending on
anaconda, which, I might add, is designed to do far more than the
relatively straightforward task of doing live cd's. I'm not even sure it
makes sense to carry around code in anaconda to facilitate live cd
installs but I'll leave that judgement call to the Anaconda developers.

FWIW, yum works perfectly fine and one goal of the pilgrim effort is to
make the process as robust as possible as well as being able to run on
host OS'es that are not super current. For example, the image I linked
to are built on an x86_64 RHEL4 box (though I had to put yum 2.9.* on
it).

There's also an historical angle here - pilgrim is the successor to the
now defunt olpc-image tools. Anaconda simply didn't allow to be used in
this way.

> If OLPC is a "derived" from Redhat or Fedora Core distribution, I really 
> do not see how this pertains to this list.

I think Rahul answered this already. I'll also note that this is not a
kadishchi specific list (or at least that's my impression) and several
people have asked me to specifically post my work here.

> On another note, what functionality does this LiveCD stuff you mention 
> provide over Fedora Core's Kadischi?
> If you are unfamiliar with Kadischi, you can find it here: 
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Kadischi
> Available via CVS.

I think there are some key differences

 - specifically designed to be able to install the livecd payload on
   your hard disk. I've read through the archives of this list and
   seen objections from Jeremy and others about the feasibility
   of changing Kadischi to facilitate this. Pretty sure there are
   few objections to the approach I've taken with pilgrim but I'll
   leave Jeremy to comment.

 - designed specifically with downstream consumers in mind, e.g. it
   must be extremely simple to put together an Fedora Eclipse, 
   Fedora Music, Fedora Livna Desktop, whatever live cd. This is what
   I tried to describe in my original mail.

 - r/w root so the OS actually works like it's supposed to (with
   the live cd ISO that I linked to you can easy yum install what
   you want or perhaps even use pirut)

 - Use selinux - ok, so I ran into some issues with enabling this
   (see the README.fedora file) so it's disabled in the ISO I linked to.
   However, if your build environment matches the target environment
   this works nicely. I'll be working on fixing this, certainly OLPC
   needs this feature anyway.

 - the codebase pilgrim is based on have been used successfully to build
   OLPC images for many months now. Pilgrim have now replaced this and
   is a critical component of the OLPC release infrastructure. As such,
   I and others are committed to maintaining pilgrim for at least this
   task.

So these are the key differences I think. 

You probably know how it is with software development. People will use
your software in unforeseen ways. As such, as software developers we
tend to make our software prepared to do this. I just happened to
identify a huge overlap between what we're doing in OLPC and what a nice
livecd infrastructure should look like. So I spent a day or two making
pilgrim doing just this.

Hope this clarifies.

    David