Re: RFE- kickstart and package selection support for livecd installs

[Jeremy Katz <katzj redhat com>]

On Mon, 2007-08-06 at 14:57 -0500, Douglas McClendon wrote:
> Jeremy Katz wrote:
> > On Mon, 2007-08-06 at 13:50 -0500, Douglas McClendon wrote:
> >> After having fully grokked the livecd-creator code, it occurs to me that it may 
> >> not be such a completely crazy idea to bring full package selection and even 
> >> kickstart support to the livecd installer.
> >>
> >> The main constraint of course is having access to the 'core' or full repo, 
> >> either via network or existing disk filesystem.
> > 
> > As it stands now, you can pretty much already say "install from here
> > rather than doing the live image" and things work.  The liveinst script
> > just kind of hides that from you.  Once I get repo selection within
> > anaconda itself a little cleaned up (on my todo list for the next week
> > or so), it becomes a lot more feasible to export that for others to
> > use.  
> > 
> > Kickstart should pretty much already be able to work"
> 
> Yeah, what I was saying would lessen the impact on pulling stuff from the 
> network and installing stuff.  But it wasn't really occurring to me that you can 
> use anaconda+network+kickstart as is already.
> 
> I suppose a minor addition, (if it's not there already), would be to invoke 
> anaconda automatically if ks= is on the kernel commandline.  So that you get 
> behaviour comparable to the traditional installation media.

Yeah.  This could be done from the livecd initscript I guess.  I'm not
sold one way or another.  If someone really cares, I'll probably do it.
Else, it'll probably stay as it is :-)
 
> >> The key aspect of feasibility I see, is how similar the task would be to the 
> >> existing livecd-creator base-on-iso code path.  I.e. that code path already 
> >> takes as input, a livecd type installation, and then effectively applies a 
> >> kickstart configuration to it.
> > 
> > I don't know that the base-on bits are really that interesting...  more
> > that you either want to 
> >  a) make changes after the system is installed
> >  b) if you made changes to the live image, have them preserved on the
> > install

> That's pretty much just a matter of using /dev/mapper/live-rw rather than 
> /dev/live-osimg  (and unfutzing things like /etc/rc.d/init.d/fedora-live)

The latter being the hard part unless you require the initscript to be
"undoable" :-/

Jeremy