[Fedora-livecd-list] Support for custom configuration using python templates

[David Zeuthen]

On Fri, 2007-04-27 at 13:45 -0400, John (J5) Palmieri wrote:
> >   %post
> >   olpc-configure-system --image-type $LIVECD_TOOLS_IMAGE_TYPE \
> >                         --olpc-build-number $OLPC_IMAGE_NUMBER \
> >                         --olpc-target $OLPC_TARGET_COUNTRY
> > 
> > Would that work for you?
> 
> In some ways it does but then again it isn't a standard solution but
> just a workaround. It still means no quick turnaround for testing but
> that is all a failing of our build system.  
> 
> %post to me is a workaround all together.  I would really have liked
> this to be more declarative, then tools could be written which had
> context to what is going on instead of this RPM black box.  A couple of
> things are already declarative in ks such as turning on and off default
> init scripts.  I would have liked to have had more intelligent systems.
> For instance with the RPM method inheritance is at the whim of how the
> post in the RPM is written.  For the most part people will get it right
> but there is also the issue that I can't optimize either.  If it was
> declarative a tool could say this file is going to be overwritten by a
> later declaration so there is no need to write it out.
> 
> I guess I am in a camp which believes we need to get away from the
> flexibility of scripting around deficiencies in our higher level tools
> and instead make the tools more robust and able to handle the corner
> cases.

Yeah, it's not that I disagree with that; it's just the way some things
work in the distro are not really optimized for custom distros just yet.

Note that this is not something specific to livecd-tools; you want these
features to apply to normal spins and other installation methods as
well. I believe both Bill and Mark did a lot of thinking on this topic
and Bill even went as far as to propose it for Fedora 7

 http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureCustomDistro

but that feature didn't make it in. Definitely worth thinking more
about...

      David