Pungi as CD installer build tool

[Jesse Keating]

On Wed, 2008-07-30 at 09:06 +1200, Martin Langhoff wrote:
> Ok. I don't particularly like the idea, but I can live with that if it
> can run inside mock.

Yes, it can be ran in mock.

> 
> > F7's pungi was really a first attempt and I don't think it was that
> > good.  Rawhide's pungi is far better, but in some of the problems I
> > discovered along the way we've fixed in other pieces of software like
> > yum and anaconda.
> 
> Does F7's pungi build a good F7 distro installer?

Well, it built F7, so you tell me (:

>  What did RH/Fedora
> use to build F1~F6? 

Some ungodly complicated tool sets that sat above anaconda-runtime's
buildinstall and pkgorder and splittree

> The RH/Fedora team has been building installer CDs
> for a long time... I am sure you guys have some well-worn tools for
> that :-) maybe I should be using something old and time-tested? I
> don't mind it being written in ksh...

A) it's not really opensource, B) it's directly tied to the buildsystem,
and C) it won't really work without kerberos setup, D) did I mention
it's ungodly complicated?

> 
> In any case, I am most interested in understanding whether it is
> designed to do what I am trying to do. If I fix/workaround its
> limitations, is it the right tool to build installer CDs that... ?

Yes.  You could use buildinstall directly to prepare the directory tree
for installability, and then call mkisofs yourself, but pungi helps you
with the preparation steps.

> 
>  - fit on CD-sized media (but then, I only have a small set of packages)

Yes

>  - have a text installer that ideally works well on low-end hw, and supports
>   serial console for headless machines

You get that for free with anaconda

>  - have good support for off-the-beaten path arches

How off the beaten path?  I've used it for x86 and ppc, I've seen it
used for ia64, sparc, and I think I've got patches somewhere for s390.
Basically anything anaconda can support, pungi can easily be made to
support.  The only tricky parts is finding said arch to run on, and
getting the mkisofs calls right to make the isos bootable.

>  - can be used for installs and upgrades

You get that for free with anaconda

>  - the kickstart environment - during install! - is close to the env you
>    get when customising a RH build

Again, anaconda

>  - are resilient and produces consistent builds

Provided you don't change out the repos you point pungi at, you'll get
the same thing over and over again.

> 
> Are there other good alternatives I should be considering?

There is reviser, not sure if it landed in F7 timeframe.  It puts a gui
on top of things, has some of it's own code for the things that pungi
does, although it does use bits and parts of pungi.

> 
> So far I have been working with livecd-tools, which is designed to do
> something else. I want to switch to the right tool.
-- 
Jesse Keating
Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature!
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