[Fedora-livecd-list] Inheritance

[Jeremy Katz]

On Tue, 2007-04-24 at 15:01 -0400, John (J5) Palmieri wrote:
> In the pilgrim tool it is fairly easy to inherit from "stream" files and
> just expand a base image into a newer image.  This means I can create a
> base description for an image, with all the required rpms and %post
> processing and then define another image description which adds more
> rpms and does more post processing.  We can even override hooks and
> files in the child description.  For instance our liveCD SDK has added
> gnome packages but does not download the ondisk html library to save
> space.  This allows me to make changes to the base image which is
> automatically reflected in the livecd image builds.
> 
> The real reason we need this is for country builds.  I know that the
> livecd tools already have the ability to take an iso and add to it but I
> also need the ability to do a build from scratch.  First can the current
> kickstart file format handle this and second how can we support this if
> it does not?

So there's the answer we have now, and then there's the longer term
answer that's been discussed a tiny bit.

The now answer is that you use %include and with that can do a
substantial amount of what you're looking for.  Basically, you could
have your base config and then a country build could be 
  %include /path/to/base.cfg
  lang fr_FR.UTF-8
(or something like that).  And that should[1] work to let you get at
least some simple inheritance.  

For more complex needs, we've talked a little in the past (where we is
mostly clumens and I, but a few others also at various points) on ways
to get a better concept of inheritance with the kickstart configs.  The
idea being that you parse one config, then the next, then the next.
Mostly what's needed there is just a little work in pykickstart to
ensure that doing a second parse pass doesn't blow up the world plus
defining the syntax of how you say "inherit from foo"

Jeremy