[Thincrust-devel] appliance-creator, spacewalk and cobbler

[Bryan Kearney]

Kay Williams wrote:
> Bryan Kearney wrote:
>> Kay Williams wrote:
>>> I am trying to wrap my head around planned relationships between 
>>> appliance-creator, spacewalk and cobbler. Does the attached diagram 
>>> look about right?
>>
>> Mostly correct. What we envision is that there is a need to manage the 
>> flow the packages within the dev process of an appliance. So, within 
>> your mirror link.. there should be a means to create a "DEV" appliance 
>> (with repos) and move them through a test / stage / production process 
>> where any of the various lifecycle steps could be on completely 
>> different machines / networks.
>>
> Here's an updated diagram. In this version I show the remote/master 
> spacewalk server as just another source of appliance content. I also 
> show two environments where appliance creator runs.  The first is a 
> lightweight developer environment where appliances are created and 
> tested quickly without need of spacewalk/cobbler infrastructure. 
  The
> second is a test/staging/production environment in which I imagine 
> Spacewalk as a container to manage lifecycle workflow including driving 
> appliance creator to build and update appliances, kicking off automated 
> test suites, and advancing tested appliance to staging and production 
> cobbler servers, etc.

I somewhat agree. I see one process where I am building appliances off 
of completely static repositories. These may be open repositories (e.g. 
Fedora) or closed. In that case, simple caching may be all that is 
required. I see a slight variance where I create a new package, and push 
it to my devel repo and build an appliance off of that. Then.. i want to 
push the spec file and code back into the integraiton repository. This 
may or may not include a repo management library.

> 
> Just one way of thinking about how the parts could all fit together from 
> a product perspective.

Agree. The other thing which cobbler provides is the ability to 
provision the image. So it would be possible to build it on one dev 
machine and "koan it up" on another. We have been talking on the cobbler 
lists about just such a patch.

-- bk