Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Jeremy Blosser <jblosser-smgl AT firinn.org>]

On Sep 18, flux [flux AT sourcemage.org] wrote:
> I guess it depends on the definition of "automation", and you and I may
> have different definitions for this. Also, there's the difference of how
> the ISO is built/what's on it as well, as the older ISOs were very
> different from what we have now. That means that the automations that
> may have applied in the past don't necessarily apply now.

This discussion/wait has been going on since before either you or I started
with SMGL.  There is a decent-sized group of people who would really just
like to see an ISO that:

1) boot as many places as possible
2) contains basic system prep tools (fdisk, mdadm, lvm, ifconfig)
3) has the latest grimoire tarball that was created as part of the stable
   testing

And that's it.  Such an ISO is not hard to make or maintain and gives a lot
of our users what they really need, while making many things possible even
for those that don't quite know what they're doing yet.

There's another group that wants the ISO to do more than this, including
having a guided installer and all those good things.  The problem is that
in taking time to make that more complete ISO, the basic thing never
happens, and people that just need that are forever being told to wait.

The last major discussion I was part of on this topic was planning to just
go ahead and make the above simple ISO, then after it was available such
that the grimoire team could even cut their own updates when a new stable
grimoire came out (just replace the tarball) go ahead and add some help
files and motd-style texts to do a very basic at-the-cli guided install,
then after that add in the menu-based stuff like we have now.

This is something I was going to take a crack at myself right around the
time I got otherwise occupied last year; I have notes somewhere but I got
through at least basic design notes and it was not really any more complex
than what I described.

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