Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Remko van der Vossen <wich AT stack.nl>]

On Sun, Jul 20, 2008 at 06:21:22PM -0400, flux wrote:
> Remko van der Vossen (wich AT stack.nl) wrote [08.07.19 07:39]:
> > How about using sync instead of umount? Then everything is definately 
> > written to
> > disk and no mounts will be forgotten and you don't have the problem of
> > unmountable filesystems which you'd have when using umount -a...
> This is an idea I will have to look into. We (the cauldron people) have
> also kicked around ideas about modifying the shutdown procedure itself,
> and making it able to simply switch directly into the installed system
> (pivot_root or switch_root) rather than even requiring a reboot. Either
> way, this is probably something for future development, rather than
> immediate. We'll see.

Why would you want to avoid the reboot? I'd rather make sure a boot goes
according to plan by actually doing the reboot rather than a bit of
trickery to get right into the system.

> > I consider it a good thing to simply have a tarball of the whole system,
> > as I have said above I prefer to simply have a shell and a tarball
> > nothing else.
> There are pros and cons to both approaches. Having a single tarball is
> simpler to manage and install from (just one tar command to install the
> system). However, it doesn't allow for optional spells (which means that
> every install must include stuff that the user might not want, and might
> be missing things the user does want), and it also requires duplication
> of binaries between the ISO and the tarball, increasing the size of the
> ISO. Having sets of tarballs will allow us to have optional spells and
> to reduce redundancy between the ISO and tarballs, saving space, but
> will complicate the install procedure a little. However, in accordance
> with our philosophy, we really have to go with sets of tarballs,
> otherwise we aren't in agreement with "what the user wants, and only
> what the user wants".

Well that's still not really a reason to break up the base system in
several tarballs, really all the installer needs to do is get a working
system the rest can be done by casting spells in the live system. And in
fact will most of the time be preferable, since a sorcery rebuild will
only be more work otherwise.

Also optional spells can be very easily taken care of, simply have a
minimal system like you have now (perhaps a bit more minimal than now,
but keep it a working base system) and have sorcery cache tarballs of
each of the optional spells on the iso, then after the base system
install simply copy the cache tarballs the user wants to the system and
resurrect them in the system.

In any case optional spells should not be a reason for the absence of a
single tarball which advanced users could simply untar to some partition
and boot from. And really that should be no problem seeing as optional
spells are... well, optional.

Remko van der Vossen

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