moving kickstart forward

[Chris Lumens]

> %pre and %post are rather large.  I first moved to using %pre for disk
> partitioning when some functionally for setting up RAID was dropped from
> the installer some time ago, and now always generate my disk layout and
> bootloader configuration in %pre.

What could we add that would allow you to ditch your %pre-based disk
partitioning?  I'm wondering if higher level commands (like you mention
later) would help, or perhaps some tools in either blivet or kickstart
that could query the system and generate kickstart commands for you?
Perhaps simply a couple tweaks to existing options would help?  Maybe we
can't actually completely replace what you're doing, but maybe we could
provide stuff that would let you get rid of a lot of it.

> %post does a bunch of site-specific setup, plus drops a script in place
> which runs as the machine boots, to pull in he full package set by
> installing a bunch of groups defined in a local comps file.

What are you doing here that can't be done with a combination of the
repo command and more stuff in the %packages section?

> CL> Do you ever use %traceback?
> 
> Didn't even know it existed.  I suppose if you're asking, you'd like to
> be able to get rid of it and so I probably shouldn't go looking into it.

Nah, I'm not going to get rid of it.  It can be very useful for
testing.  I'm curious as to what other people may be using it for.  In
general, I'm not looking to get rid of anything - just trying to
understand what people are doing and where we can make things easier.

> Not really kickstart itself, but have dracut pass as much information as
> possible about the machine.  It would be super great if it could post
> some json or something.

So, information about the machine being passed into the process that
runs kickstart?  That would be doable.  We'd just have to decide what
that information is and then consider that part of an API that doesn't
change.

Or alternately, more information being supplied to the server when the
kickstart file is fetched?  That would also be doable.

> Back before I did all of the disk setup in %pre, I found myself wishing
> I had some sort of conditional statement.  If this much disk, then use
> this layout.

I've been thinking about adding more language features - variables,
conditionals, etc.  It's a little complicated by the fact that a lot of
people use some sort of templating language with their kickstarts
already.  I don't want to make a bigger mess of this situation.

> I also wish it were simpler to set up a filesystem setup without
> worrying so much about the actual partitioning, Just being able to say
> "give me a VG that's RAID1 across these disks" would be much simpler
> than generating a partitioning scheme.

This is really interesting.  It sounds like you want a kickstart version
of what we've got in custom partitioning right now.  We can definitely
look into this.  I know the current partitioning commands are really low
level, and people do seem to like that, but we've not really gotten
around to providing anything on top of them.

> Having some simple ways to indicate the services I want to have enabled,
> and which selinux booleans I'd like set might be handy, I suppose, to
> get rid of some things in %post.  But for all I know, those might exist
> these days and I just need to read the docs.

Yeah, there's already a services command.  That came out of another
round of email like this I did many years ago.  Something for selinux
booleans does not already exist, but it could be added.

- Chris