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

[Daniel Drake]

2009/2/23 Martin Langhoff <martin.langhoff at gmail.com>:
> 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?

As Ties pointed out, it's related to .toc contents files (which
XS-rsync calls .contents) and not content bundles.

At the moment we are using http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image_builder to
build OS images for NANDblasting/USB flashing/....

In future, we would like to use the same tool to build an image
suitable for the XS to distribute using XS-rsync. 2 changes are needed
to the image builder process for this to happen:
 1. it should optionally output a tarball (in addition to, or instead
of a jffs2 image). trivial modification to the script.
 2. we need a .contents file, because XS-rsync requires that

Right now, image builder is a nice standalone script without any
painful dependencies, but generating the .contents file for (2) is a
bit tricky. It would require installation of olpc-contents on the
local system, which really means packaging for various distributions
etc. It would be nicer if the server could create the .contents file
for itself, which would not be hard. It even seems to unpack the
tarball already for other reasons.

Daniel