Fedora Desktop on XO

[Michael Stone]

On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 07:40:07PM -0500, Reuben K. Caron wrote:
> Peter Robinson wrote:
>> Hi Chris,
>>
>>   
>>>   > I would remove the old fc9 build from the olpc_development repo (or
>>>   > even have one for 8.2.0 and one for 9.1.0 so they don't get mixed
>>>   > up).  Surely it should be pulling cyrus-sasl from the Fedora repos
>>>   > anyway?
>>>
>>> I've just pushed a patch to pilgrim's joyride branch to switch the
>>> baseurl that gets written out in /etc/yum.repos.d/olpc-development.repo
>>> from http://xs-dev.laptop.org/~cscott/repos/dist-olpc3-devel/ to
>>> http://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/static-repos/dist-olpc4-build-current/i386/
>>>
>>> (olpc3 is our 8.2/F9 repo, and olpc4 is the 9.1/F10 repo, so Joyride
>>> should have been switched to write out the olpc4 baseurl when we
>>> created the new repo.)
>>>
>>> And, after the change, we don't have depsolving problems any more!
>>> Here's the list of packages to be downloaded -- the next question is
>>> going to be how to avoid many of these dependencies.  Perhaps instead
>>> of trying the groupinstall, we should be hand-picking a smaller base
>>> of GNOME packages from this list?
>>>     
>>
>> Well its the list up to the "Installing for dependencies" that is
>> explicitly requested, all the below is pulled in for deps. I'm not
>> sure how pilgrim builds the list but I think if it uses kickstart like
>> the other fedora build systems do you should be able to do a specific
>> "-packagename" and its removed from the list.
>>
>>   
> Does pilgrim (Puritan?) use "kickstart" like files? 

Nope. 

> If not, why do we not create builds using what seems to be fedora's
> standard build system?

The short answer is that there has never been consensus among the people
dealing with OLPC's builds that anaconda was the right tool for the job.

The longer answer involves a lot of politics which I'm /really/ not
interested in stirring up but which are unavoidable if you want to
really understand how things came to be the way that they are. In order
to navigate this quandary, I'm going to offer you a series of
thought-questions which, I hope, will lead you to your own answer to
your question. 

(If you want, you can ask me tomorrow for my answers to them but you
should try to construct your own answers first.)

Hope this helps,

Michael

---------

a) Requirements.
 
   1. What do you think a build system for OLPC and for XOs needs to do?

   2. What explorations have been made in the area of XO-related build
      systems?

   3. What lists of requirements (or audiences) do each of these
      explorations seem to be trying to satisfy? 

b) History & Incumbency of Pilgrim.

   1. Why did davidz write pilgrim?

   2. Why did pilgrim not use anaconda?

   3. Why did davidz later write livecd-tools using anaconda?
   
   4. What do you have to do in order to get OLPC to use a different
      build system?

c) People & Politics

   1. Who has worked on build-system stuff for XOs? for OLPC?
   
   2. How might we describe their knowledge, skills, interests, aims, etc
      at the time? 
      
   3. What demands were placed on them at the time they worked on
      build-system related things?
      
   4. How should we describe their relationships with one another?