[Server-devel] XS Update: build tools, pungi, xs-rsync

[Martin Langhoff]

Some notes that will come out in the community news tomorrow -

- I'm working hard to make xs-0.4 a more featureful release, I know
0.3 is _boring_ :-)

- I've spent a lot of time exploring the state of distro build tools
for Fedora. The livecd approach we use on the XS images is brittle and
not suitable for upgrades; we need to move to traditional installer
CDs using either pungi or revisor. I now have a sample pungi config
file that can build a minimal F9 install, and scripts that turn the CD
installer into a USB installer. Unfortunately, anaconda maintainers
are threatening to deprecate text-based installations.

- After studying Scott's update-server, I've started putting
together an "xs-rsync" package to publish content via rsync on the XS,
with utilities that allow it to serve XO builds mimicking
update-server's behaviour. Unfortunately, update-server is mostly
dedicated to the task of serving rsync://updates.laptop.org/, a
completely different task, and code reuse opportunities were about
nil.

For the XS to be useful as an updates server it needs be paired with
the local activation server, so that's what I'll be working on next
week :-)

cheers,



m
-- 
 martin.langhoff at gmail.com
 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
 - ask interesting questions
 - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first
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