OS upgrades are painful

[Owen Williams]

On Sun, 2007-03-18 at 21:09 +0545, Bipin Gautam wrote:
> On 3/18/07, Albert Cahalan <acahalan at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Must we overwrite everything with a disk image? Most of the data
> > doesn't need to change.
> >
> > I'm mostly dogfooding here. I install development tools (gcc, make,
> > joe, cvs, libSDL), check out my source code, etc. My only real cheat
> > is to ssh in from a machine with a reliable space bar. A nand flash
> > overwrite means I have to reinstall everything, S-L-O-W-L-Y.
> > _______________________________________________
> 
> yes good question!
> why doesnt the devlopment build have GCC, rpm, cvs and many other
> needed tools? Or are we too fearful to confront 512 mb is NOT enough
> storage?
> 
> regards,
> -bipion

This is very easy to work around.  One option is to install images on a
USB key that's bigger than 512 meg and then use gparted to make the
filesystem the full size of the key.  Another option is to use an SD
card to store a development environment or other extra data.    I keep a
batch of rpms that I need to work on an SD card, and install them when I
boot a new image.  I also rsync my home directory back and forth to
minimize setup time.

I do think that the devel images should be free to grow bigger than the
target OS image size, but developers need to be careful to try out the
standard build once in a while to make sure it still works.  I've found
a bug or two that resulted from the standard builds missing pieces from
the devel builds.

(hint: another trick you can use sometimes is to create a swap partition
on an SD card.  You shouldn't rely on it too heavily, but it's another
way to make the system workable for hardcore developing.)

owen