[Server-devel] Building LiveCDs -

[Martin Langhoff]

People might be wondering why we haven't seen a new build in a while,
even though ds-backup has been packaged, and we have several minor
bugs and issues fixed in xs-config and xs-pkgs. Part of the problem is
that the livecd creation tools have quite brittle and unexplained
dependencies in their environments.

Wad used to prep livecds on a machine known as duplicator. That box
had the magic :-) and managed to crank out builds alright -- but right
now it is offline - I think I took it offline when I was last in
Boston myself. Other boxes were known to "not" have the magic -- I
don't like build toolchains that require magic, build tools have to be
stable, resilient and reproduceable.

Dennis told me that on F9 all the build tools, including livecd-tools,
were much more solid, and that I'd be able to build everything for F7
from F9, so I've rebuilt my 'xs-builder' box as a F9 box, and pulled
in the appropriate packages. rpm building has worked after a bit of
tweaking. LiveCD tools are a different story.

After a few feeble early attempts at building a livecd, on Friday I
took on it for real. Well, I have now spent my weekend playing
whack-a-mole with this. Part of the fun is documented in the thread
below:

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-July/msg01513.html

So it is Sunday evening, I have a patch to livecd-tools, with this
I've stopped the kernel panics.

cheers,



martin
ps: while waiting spinning various livecds, I also tested pungi, which
seems saner than livecd tools, but it crashes inmediately and
obscurely on our repositories.
-- 
 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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