[Fedora-livecd-list] ARRRG

[Douglas McClendon]

Tim Wood wrote:

[ paraphrase: "ARRG" snipped ]

> Can anyone tell me how I can:
> 1) get a system up and running under Fedora 7, Fedora 8 or CentOS that 
> will predictably produce LiveCDs
> 2) keep it from blowing the !#@$!@#$ up

FWIW, I haven't noticed any similar problems lately, but I use 
livecd-creator, and not revisor, which apparently utilizes a 
significantly forked version of livecd-creator.

Certainly F8 doesn't exist yet, so one must not have the expectation 
that it can be used for a stable development system.

While nothing I'm about to say helps you now, here is a reiteration of 
my theoretical QA plan to mitigate similar problems in the future-

A) install livecd-tools and revisor by default in a standard spin. 
developer spin seems like the right place.  I don't think either will 
bring in many new dependencies, i.e. take up signifcant space.

B) have a dedicated QA server spinning up daily spins of (A).  These QA 
spins would be served via bittorrent.  This server would be f7(stable) 
pulling in updates via yum daily.  After being created, these spins 
would be booted under headless qemu, displaying to a vnc recorded 
session.  These boot-videos would be available via bittorrent as well, 
as well as basic boot-speed timing analysis, and logfiles from the boot.

C) have another server like (B), except which is a rawhide, updated 
daily system, running git livecd-tools, doing exactly the same thing.

So far, this doesn't really guarantee to have prevented your issue, but 
one could imagine the server (B), booting the daily spin under qemu, and 
then _respinning_ that(itself) under qemu, and then comparing the 
output.  Sure, this isn't likely to be implemented _real soon_, but I do 
love the ultimate "eating your own dogmeat" aspect of it.


Additionally, I still intend to one of these days (perpetually 'soon') 
provide an alternate livecd creation tool, which doesn't require root 
privileges.  The fact that every time you build a livecd, 700+ rpms are 
happily running their %pre/%post as root under a chroot, still scares me 
when I run livecd-creator.  For instance, don't try putting this in your 
  kickstart's %post (seriously, unless you like black poweroff of death)-

find / -exec touch -t 199912211221 '{}' ';'

<end of rambling soapboxing that doesn't really solve your problem>

-dmc