Public SourceMage Discussion List

[flux <flux AT sourcemage.org>]

Remko van der Vossen (wich AT stack.nl) wrote [08.07.21 16:56]:
> 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.
Allow me to clarify: it's not about preventing or avoiding a reboot, but
about at least giving the option of rebooting. Right now we don't
provide a way to avoid it, but we did in the past.

> 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
What I meant about having the optional spells was not the complete
removal of a basesystem spell, but the slimming down of the basesystem
tarball to really only be a basesystem, and push all the completely
non-essential spells out into their own spells (like lilo, grub, etc.),
so that the user will install those separately. However, this means that
there will still be an absence of a single tarball for the whole system,
since the bootloader will not be included (and necessarily not included,
else we are forcing a choice of bootloader or at least forcing the
choice of including a bootloader, which violates our social contract).
The bulk of what you would need for a working system would still be in
one tarball, but not everything needed. The only way I can imagine to
have a single tarball for a whole working system without violating our
social contract would be to have multiple such tarballs, one with each
different type of bootloader for example, as well as for the other
"optional but required" things, which would just be horrible. Also, the
argument about the sorcery rebuild is moot, since it will rebuild the
same spells regardless of whether they were installed from a single
tarball or a collection of separate tarballs. The only additional work
is in running more than one tar command to install them into the target
system, which can be done from a script anyway (of course there will be
a little more work in the development of the ISO, but in the long run
this will actually make developing the ISO less work).

On a side note, for users who really just want to do what you are doing
(I am not discouraging what you are doing, but I do consider it to be
more advanced than what some other users might be doing), you can just
grab one of the basesystem tarballs and run with that, as that seems to
be what you want anyway. One of the reasons we have those is for the
advanced users :).

-- 
Justin "flux" Boffemmyer
Cauldron wizard and general mage
Source Mage GNU/Linux
http://www.sourcemage.org

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