[Server-devel] XS-rsync: automatic .contents creation

[Ties Stuij]

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 8:06 AM, Martin Langhoff
<martin.langhoff at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 4:12 AM, Daniel Drake <dsd at laptop.org> wrote:
>> If the XS shipped olpc-contents
>> (http://xs-dev.laptop.org/~cscott/repos/joyride/olpc-contents-2.5-1.i386.rpm)
>> then it would be easy to make XS-rsync be able to generate the
>> .contents file automatically from the .tar.bz2 tree file.
>
> Interesting idea. Not sure I understand it fully. It sounds to me like
> it'd be useful to wrap up content created or aggregated "online" on
> the XS (using Moodle, for example) -- content that you want to bundle
> up for download to the XOs.

Yes, I'd also like this included. Martin, my guess is you're confusing
concepts. The .contents or .toc file is used when updating or flashing
an XO image, for example by olpc-update to verify the stuff that's now
on the XO is the stuff that's expected. Or perhaps you're forseeing
other uses.

The way to create a .contents file right now is damn right dirty. You
basically chroot into the fs tree of an XO on the server and use the
contents manifest builder which is present in every standard XO.
That's what we're doing now in any case, and that's what Pilgrim does.
If one can believe the Pilgrim inline documentation, this was done
this way because Python 2.5 (often?) wasn't available on the servers
at the time. And I'm just lazy.

/Ties

> I'm not sure that it'd help with the backups/restore workflow. AFAIK,
> a content bundle will appear as one entry in your journal.... if it's
> able to unpack into separate entries in your Journal, then you're hit
> gold with your thinking.
>
>> Is it possible to include that RPM, and would such patches be considered?
>
> Anything that is useful in deployments I'm happy to include :-) - just
> need to flesh out how it's useful to more/most rather than a bespoke
> trick.
>
> Can you flesh out the use cases a bit more?
>
> 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
>  - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff
> _______________________________________________
> Server-devel mailing list
> Server-devel at lists.laptop.org
> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
>