Joyide on Fedora 11/rawhide

[Michael Stone]

On Wed, Feb 04, 2009 at 05:53:14PM -0500, Chris Ball wrote:
>Hi,
>
>   > This is Fedora's initramfs, right?
>
>Right.
>
>   > Peter's suggestion is to use pilgrim to create rawhide builds,
>   > hence using the olpc initramfs.
>
>That's an interesting idea.  I don't like it long-term, because
>no-one's working on pilgrim or our initramfs, but it could help
>us get moving.

Two small corrections:

a) the initramfs continues happily under active volunteer development -- it
received two new features and a bugfix contributed by a deployment support
volunteer (dsd) in the last two weeks, along with patch review and volunteer
testing by folks back here in the States.

b) While pilgrim may be a dead-end, the ideas underlying it are not. This week,
I translated pilgrim's ideas into the simplest form yet achieved, namely, a
plain old Makefile:

   http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/mstone/puritan;a=tree;hb=make

and used it to produce builds from the olpc4+joyride tree and the
rawhide+olpc4+joyride tree (with minor edits). 

The former booted happily into Sugar and built on both Debian and Fedora. :) 
(The latter, still using the olpc initramfs, dies because upstart 0.5 still
doesn't know how to run as non-pid-1. olpc4's upstart-0.3.9 has a patch which
implements this feature.)

>   > Peter does not have an XO (grr at contrib program extreme slowness!)
>   > but may be able to help on other issues that surface as the result
>   > of an available public build...
>
>Oh, let's fix that.  Ed, SJ, could one of you take care of sending
>Peter some XOs ASAP, please?

Good idea.

Michael