Deployment image customization

[Daniel Drake]

On Tue, Dec 23, 2008 at 2:19 PM, Greg Smith <gregsmitholpc at gmail.com> wrote:
> Your suggestion that we allow
> addition of RPMs and get those built into a signed image via "pilgrim or
> puritan" is certainly valuable and part of the requirement.
>
> However, it doesn't cover a few added things (language settings was
> specifically requested by Mongolia and others):
>
> - Updated language packs (I believe we are trying to make this an RPM which
> may solve it)
> - Starting language
> - Date, time and timezone
> - Network settings

Well, my suggestion of pilgrim and puritan was only for customising
RPM packages. For the other things, I wrote:
"As for other customisations, the current method (customization key)
works fine for the limited customisations that it allows, so that
simply needs to be expanded. "

I could have probably worded that better. In other words, my opinion
is that the existing customisation stick system should be expanded to
also allow customisation of timezone, language settings, translation
installation, etc.

> The biggest challenge I see is to find those things which you do not want to
> "clone" from the source XO. The only things that come to mind are Name and
> Color. We could even pre-fill them as long as those dialog boxes come up at
> start up.

There is a lot more than that - it's things that are invisible to the
user, technical details of the system, which are the bits we don't
have a good answer for. For example (an easy one), keys are generated
on first boot, but it is potentially bad news down the line if
multiple XOs have the same keys. The hard part is tracking these
things, which are not specified anywhere and there's no one place you
can look to find them. I wish I could find a link to Michael's mail,
where he investigated some of these things for an old build, and some
of the findings were surprising even to us who hack on the system
level all day...

> In short, I like your proposal but I still want a little more :-)

If you're looking for initial high-level action items:
1. The discussions on lease delegation / allowing countries to sign
their builds / providing customised builds for countries need to be
finished. The outcome would be someone implementing whatever method
allows country A to say "we want OLPC build B with added RPMs C,D,E"
2. Someone needs to implement the customization stick enhancements
(and surrounding projects, such as xot bundles). Will require some
modifications on the sugar-level too.

Daniel