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

[Martin Langhoff]

On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 2:48 AM, Daniel Drake <dsd at laptop.org> wrote:
> 2009/2/23 Martin Langhoff <martin.langhoff at gmail.com>:
>> 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.

Colour me confused. What's the use case where the XS builds a special
local image?

The use case for xs-rsync serving content for olpc-update is for OS
upgrades, which are generated in various formats by the team that
manages the XS/XO infra at a central location, tested, some of the
formats are signed (for NAND-flash updates), and so on and so forth.

The XS generating its own images _locally_ is not something I
considered. It sounds risky - serving a botched image will... botch
XOs!.. that's why the "unpack the tar" part of the xs-rsync scripts is
so anally paranoid.

Sorry to sound repetitive... what's the use case?

> 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.

Hmmmm. The way you're describing it makes me think that .contents
still belongs in the image-preparation stage. Maybe fold the relevant
bits of code into your script?

cheers,


m
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