[Fedora-livecd-list] [PATCH 6/6] Several Kernels

[Jeremy Katz]

On Mon, 2007-08-06 at 23:59 +0200, Jeroen van Meeuwen wrote:
> Jeremy Katz wrote:
> > On Sun, 2007-08-05 at 20:40 +0200, Jeroen van Meeuwen wrote:
> >> A patch which allows multiple kernels to be installed on the live media,
> >> giving boot options in the syslinux menu for all of them.
> > 
> > This part looks mostly reasonable...
> > 
> >> In addition, this patch adds an optional timeout parameter for the boot
> >> menu. It also adds a cli parameter for appending boot options.
> > 
> > I think a better approach for this, though, is to extend the kickstart
> > bootloader syntax a little bit.  The proliferation of command-line
> > options for this is a little ridiculous.  Also, it leads to the images
> > not being reproducible just from the kickstart config
>
> It's never reproducible from kickstart config as kickstart is not
> allowing you to set specific version numbers, nor filesystem
> compression, prelinking, ignoring deleted files, etc.

Version numbers should be able to be specified if you want that level of
reproducibility.  Filesystem compression/ignoring deleted files are
largely developer options for convenience and not something which (in my
mind at least) should be a part of a "production" image.  Adding the
prelinking option was, in retrospect, something of a mistake and should
either have been done by extending kickstart or just using the %post.  

I actually want to sit down and do some clean-up of the options to sort
of "hide" the developer only options and try to make it more obvious
that the kickstart config is the way to go

> I'd rather have some error, bug or dis-functionality that I can fix. I
> can't read your mind and think of the better approach without seeing the
> code live in some upstream source repository. If it's reasonable, like
> the previous patch, you get to apply it and _then_ think of a better
> way, then apply that. Just a cloud of better ideas doesn't make it rain.

No, you get feedback to the patch saying "maybe try this way instead"
and that can point you down a path that's cleaner.  It doesn't have to
be in the upstream repo to get feedback and act on it.  Maybe I wasn't
clear enough in what I was suggesting, so I'll try to flesh it out a
little more.  

Rather than command line options for the timeout, preferred kernel and
bootloader options, we should probably use the existing kickstart
"bootloader" stanza and extend it a bit.  It already has an option to
specify additional kernel options ("--append") which we can use.  And
then it would make sense to also have it take a --timeout and
--defaultkernel (or similar) option.  This will let us parse the info
from the config rather than from the command line and carrying things
around

Ultimately, we'll want this in pykickstart itself, but we could start
with a subclass of the KickstartParser with a custom KickstartHandler
for the bootloader command.  Just the patch to pykickstart is likely to
be simpler, though.  And having the livecd-creator patch depend on the
pykickstart change is okay

Jeremy