Pungi as CD installer build tool

[Martin Langhoff]

2008/7/30 Jesse Keating <jkeating at redhat.com>:
> Pungi is mostly meant to run for the release it exists on.  So if you
> wanted to compose F7 releases, you need to run the F7 pungi on F7.  This
> is due to a number of reasons, mostly the APIs of the tools it uses as
> well as the kernel version that will be booted, etc...

Ok. I don't particularly like the idea, but I can live with that if it
can run inside mock.

> F7's pungi was really a first attempt and I don't think it was that
> good.  Rawhide's pungi is far better, but in some of the problems I
> discovered along the way we've fixed in other pieces of software like
> yum and anaconda.

Does F7's pungi build a good F7 distro installer? What did RH/Fedora
use to build F1~F6? The RH/Fedora team has been building installer CDs
for a long time... I am sure you guys have some well-worn tools for
that :-) maybe I should be using something old and time-tested? I
don't mind it being written in ksh...

In any case, I am most interested in understanding whether it is
designed to do what I am trying to do. If I fix/workaround its
limitations, is it the right tool to build installer CDs that... ?

 - fit on CD-sized media (but then, I only have a small set of packages)
 - have a text installer that ideally works well on low-end hw, and supports
  serial console for headless machines
 - have good support for off-the-beaten path arches
 - can be used for installs and upgrades
 - the kickstart environment - during install! - is close to the env you
   get when customising a RH build
 - are resilient and produces consistent builds

Are there other good alternatives I should be considering?

So far I have been working with livecd-tools, which is designed to do
something else. I want to switch to the right tool.

cheers,



m
-- 
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 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
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