[Fedora-livecd-list] Refactoring livecd-creator and providing an API

[Jeroen van Meeuwen]

I've taken a good look at the proposed API and for now I'll just state 
some items where I have some questions, doubts or concerns on how to 
perform what it is we need to perform.

* In the 'image.InstallPackages()', would it be possible to not use the 
yum object provided by livecd-creator itself? Given that tools built 
upon livecd-creator may already have a complete yum object it could be 
useful to hand over the yum object to this function

* In conjunction with the previous question would it be possible to not 
have livecd-creator set up it's own yum object -merely an efficiency 
question and completely secondary-?

* For any type of extra configuration or external configuration (e.g. 
non-kickstart), would it be possible to have variables such as 
'build_dir', 'yum_cache' and '_instroot' defined in (for example) 
__init__() so that once we create a class instance we can override them 
with another value? More specifically; if we call ImageCreator.setup() 
directly now, there's nothing we can do anymore to point our existing 
yum installroot to the 'install_root/' directory under which the 
loopback filesystem is mounted. More granular functions all doing 
little, very little bits and pieces might help too.

Regarding this I see ImageCreatorBase._get_instroot() and _instroot = 
property(_get_instroot) -I'm not sure how I could override that -if 
possible.

* Can we please drop the '-' in the 'livecd-creator' file so that we can 
import it? It'll be a lot easier for us to provide actual feedback in 
the form of patches, on what we need changed in the API.

Kind regards,

Jeroen van Meeuwen
-kanarip

Jeremy Katz wrote:
> It's time to get back to something that's been discussed on and off for
> a while now and really do it.  And that's to refactor out the core of
> livecd-creator so that it can be used for generating other types of
> images as well as then providing an API to be used by people wanting to
> build various types of interfaces on top of the tools.
> 
> After sitting down and poking a little, I've got something that I'm at
> least starting to be happy with and figure it's about time to put it up
> for others to look at and poke at.  Right now, the git tree is on
> fedorapeople rather than in the main repo.  You can get it with
>   git clone http://katzj.fedoraproject.org/git/livecd-tools.git
> 
> I've written up a short overview of the API and included it in the repo
> and attached it to this message as well.  I've tried to keep the amount
> that we expose pretty minimal so that we can continue to have a fair bit
> of freedom in changing out the backend bits, especially the ones related
> to writing out configuration[1] info.
> 
> Comments and suggestions appreciated, especially from those building on
> top of livecd-tools or wanting to build other image builders.  I'm going
> to likely go ahead and get this merged within the next week or so as
> long as it's not entirely crazy.  Also, it's pending on splitting up the
> current __init__ into separate modules to allow for cleaner namespacing
> 
> Jeremy
> 
> [1] In the future, this is something that we want to be able to share
> with anaconda as we're currently doing a lot of duplication of bugfixes
> and having to deal with slight variations in behavior between the two.
> Which sucks.
> 
> 
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