[Fedora-livecd-list] [PATCH] -fs.py-kickstart.py-chages-for-mulit-partitions

[Mark McLoughlin]

On Wed, 2008-05-28 at 14:36 -0400, Jeremy Katz wrote:
> > The ability for a tool to create these partitioned disk images via the
> > command like, livecd-creator, is very helpful in reproducing known state
> > appliances, epically with the rising use of visualization.  Going
> > through a actual install in a vm limits you to VM container, xen, kvm,
> > vmware and adds extra overhead of building on a machine with extra virt
> > resources.  
> 
> Reproducing known state should work just as well with a kickstart config 
> and doing an install via, eg, virt-install.  Yes, it adds overhead, but 
> there are also advantages in functionality and it also means *not* 
> maintaining this sort of code in multiple places.  And that's a pretty 
> big win as partitioning code is not in the least bit trivial. 
> Especially as you start trying to handle more and more of the cases.

That pretty lame - you're trying to curtail what use cases people make
imgcreate support purely because we haven't figured out how to do a
better job of sharing code with anaconda.

The very least we should be doing is allowing imgcreate to be extended
externally in this manner ... but that doesn't fix the "multiple copies
of this code" issue, it merely pushes it elsewhere and makes it less
likely it'll ever be fixed.

Clearly, one advantage of imgcreate tools over a full blown anaconda
install in a VM is that it's far less complex to debug when it all goes
wrong. That's a huge advantage to people repeatedly rebuilding images as
they develop a LiveCD or an appliance.

Cheers,
Mark.