[PATCH 3/3] dracut has initrd-generic-<version> instead of initrd-<version> (#519185)

[Hans de Goede]

Hi,

On 09/03/2009 03:36 PM, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Hans de Goede (j.w.r.degoede at hhs.nl) said:
>>> The fact that it wasn't turned on at Alpha means it really shouldn't be
>>> on now, not without FESCo approval.
>>
>> That is interesting reasoning, first keep it out of Alpha even though it was
>> ready as you were afraid it would delay the Alpha further (although there were
>> no open bugs) and no now use that to also keep it out of Fedora 12 entirely.
>
> I agree - certainly, there has been nothing raised to FESCo yet to
> disable it, and it was not removed from the feature list in any FESCo
> discussion. That discussion can certainly be had if someone wants to raise
> it to FESCo.
>
>>> We've got some licensing concerns with a pre-generated binary blob of
>>> bits from other packages being shipped with the kernel package, and the
>>> kernel srpm doesn't have any sources to match those binary blobs.
>>>
>>
>> We already do the same with the stage1 and stage2 images of anaconda. The
>> initrd is just a cpio archive, like the livecd images are just an iso, it is
>> all mere aggregation.
>
> The issue is that stage1/stage2 are generated at *tree* build time, and
> therefore are guaranteed to match the tree (and source RPMs) we ship.
> As dracut images are currently built at *kernel* build time, that is
> not the case. Moving to building initramfs at kernel install time would
> solve this.
>

Yes, but also loose one of the main advantage, that everyone with
kenrel-versionFoo is using the exact same initrd, if we build at install
time, and there is for example an mdraid issue, how do I know which exact version
of mdadm is in the initrd ?

I know this argument can be reversed, that if the exact version is not known, people
cannot excercise their rights under the GPL. So I suggest we add a list of package
NEVR's to the kernel rpm which contains the exact packages used to build the initrd,
yet still keep building it as part of the kernel rpm (so at build time), as this is
much easier for debugging issues.

It really is like having to support gentoo, versus having to support a distro using
pre build packages. And I would really like to move to the having to support a
pre-build package model for the initrd.

Regards,

Hans