Creating a Puritan Howto for Ubuntu (8.10)

[Mike Dawson]

Dear All,

After surveying the tools that we have available for creating custom
OLPC builds which seems to be a menu of NAND Customizer, Pilgrim, or
Puritan Puritan looks like being the way forward for us as we have not
yet invested much time / effort in other tools (we run a shell script
customizer on the first laptops we put out),

Puritan seems to have better support for Ubuntu (when we tried Pilgrim
before we gave up on Ubuntu, ran it in a Fedora VM, then on our
bandwidth had to run on a Fedora VM on a remote server in Germany),
and the principles behind it look like meeting the challenges we face.
 What I really like is caching - that is unbelievably important.
Squid does not do a good job of caching repos etc. and the only way
before we did that was running Polipo to cache every single HTTP
request mindlessly.

1. On applying the patch to mock - Not quite sure how that is done
here as the mock package through apt is compiled in binary.  We tried
apt-get source mock and then grep for the strings which are in the
patch; but it has:

PKGPYTHONDIR = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(os.path.realpath(sys.argv[0])),
"mock")
not
PKGPYTHONDIR="/var/lib/python-support/python2.4/mock" (as specified by
the patch referenced at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Puritan - Ubuntu
section

Which makes mock.patch fail.

What is the recommended way of dealing with this?  Can we make an
official debian format patch for this package or maybe setup a PPA?

2. Are there any specific instructions for ensuring that caching is
enabled?  Couldn't find that on the wiki at the moment...

3. I would like to make a more step by step kind of Wiki page for new
deployments such as ourselves here in Afghanistan - I have started at
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Puritan/StepByStep - hopefully we can go
through the whole thing tested against a regular Ubuntu 8.10 install
so that we have something for deployments to quickly and easilyget
going with making custom images.

Thanks,

-Mike