Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Casey Harkins <charkins AT upl.cs.wisc.edu>]

On Thu, 19 Jun 2003 wandre.l AT free.fr wrote:
> Apparently caseyh should be able to work by himself (if error, tell us 
> caseyh:)

No problems with that. The network configuration is almost done (see bug
#3531). I will need to discuss with someone on how to get the installer to
use this (basically just 'chroot /mnt/root /usr/sbin/netconf' when the
user wants to configure networking, assuming net-tools has already been
installed on the hard drive).

I may tackle ppp configuration next and could even do pppoe if someone
could describe the setup for me and test it.

> <other topic>
> w0rf suggested copying the base system (iso content) to hard drive, 
> preventing
> us from having image.tar.bz2. that would require some on-the-fly changes 
> while
> copying, but i feel this is possible. comments, ideas, thoughts, flames ?

I think a better solution would be to include separate binary packages for
each spell (taken straight from /var/cache/sorcery on the iso build
machine) needed for the hard drive basesystem. This way, some optional
basesystem components could be excluded for those who don't need them
(minicom,reiserfsprogs,xfsprogs,raidtools,etc). It also lends itself well
to building auto-install cd's since extra binary packages could be
included and installed through some configuration script.

Depending on what language and external tools the new installer will use,
the iso filesystem can probably be trimmed down significantly by using a
statically linked busybox whenever possible. I did a line-by-line analysis
of the current installer a little while ago and found that only bash,
consolechars, dialog, hwclock, loadkeys, mkfs, mkreiserfs, cfdisk, fdisk
and parted were not provided by busybox (actually shutdown was not
included either, but busybox does provide a reboot command).

I guess the ideal situation *is* to have a basesystem on the iso and have
everything built directly onto the hard drive without ever installing
binary packages. This could be possible by getting the iso filesystem
accessible from within a chroot /mnt/root and fudging the paths so that
the compiler and libraries on the cd can be found while building.

Just my 1/2 cent...

-casey