Slimmed Down Fedora 10 on XO (was Fedora 10 on XO)

[Erik Garrison]

On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 02:44:17PM -0500, Bobby Powers wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 12:27 PM, Erik Garrison <erik at laptop.org> wrote:
> 
> >
> > I have been quite frustrated with the Fedora toolset in this regard.
> > Getting a bare minimum of functionality is not something which these
> > tools are typically used to do.  The experience of building a Fedora
> > system from 'scratch' contrasts starkly with what we find in Debian,
> > where debootstrapping is a common development pattern which is
> > well-supported by the community.
> >
> > It can be done, and I am going to seek as much help from the Fedora
> > community in doing so as possible.  It just isn't easy and I have felt
> > like there are a lot of problems in using Fedora in this fashion which
> > will have to be resolved to make it easy for deployments to use such a
> > build script.
> >
> > (I sincerely hope someone flames me here as any attention to this issue
> > is good attention.)
> 
> 
> sure :) why aren't you building off mstone's work on Puritan?  It seems like
> a lot of duplication of effort; unless I'm missing something, the biggest
> difference seems to be that yours may be more debian-like.

For one, Puritan is a multi-file python framework, which, for a build
script which I would like to be as short and clear as possible, may be
overkill.  Shellscript is plenty concise for this work.  I was able to
get everything done that I needed without the script getting unweildy.
I was additionally able to directly pull in some of the bashisms from
the xodist toolset which deal with partitioned image creation,
configuration heredocs, etc. (thank you dilinger and xodist devs).

Additionally, writing my own simple build system was a great way to work
through all the issues involved in setting up a given distribution to
run on the XO.  I came away from this work with a much better
understanding of what issues our software development faces and the
specific issues involved in setting up Fedora on the XO (such as nash
and initramfsen jffs2 mounting woes).

Otherwise, I don't think it really matters, and think that Michael and I
should work together going forward.  If Puritan does exactly what I have
been trying to do and more, then I support working with it and will move
that way.  That said, if there is interest in having the 'simplest'
build system possible, I can continue work on the rpmxo buildscripts.

Hope that explains my perspective.

Erik