[Fedora-livecd-list] Some braindumping

[Jeremy Katz]

I spent a little bit of time a few months ago looking at Kadischi and
sent Darko a bit of feedback (also based on some mail from him on what
he saw the next steps as being).  So, I figure it's time that I take
that information and dump it for the wider audience now.

Most of the suggestions are from the standpoint of trying to minimize
the delta needed for creating a live CD and using existing
infrastructure as much as possible (even in cases where that requires
extending the infrastructure for things to work more cleanly).  In the
longer term, they're the sorts of things that make it so that live CDs
can be more prevalent in the Fedora space and require less special case
work to maintain.

* The initrds currently being generated by Kadischi are from a one off
script rather than utilizing mkinitrd.  This means that you have to
generate the initrd by hand afterwards instead of having the kernel post
script do it for you.  It also means that changes have to be tracked in
the Kadischi version of the script.  With the mkinitrd currently in
rawhide, there is the ability to override commands from nash.  Also,
with the support for handling multiple initramfs's, a secondary
initramfs can be created that just has the overriden commands.  For
ensuring that modules get included in the initrd, there is some support
for overriding things that are detected via /etc/sysconfig/mkinitrd --
we probably want to make it so that anaconda ensures
that /etc/sysconfig/mkinitrd is generated correctly so the first time an
initrd is created, it's "right"
* The ro root initscripts changes need to be integrated.  But I think
Bill is going to be actively working on this ;-)
* There's been an ongoing concern that including support for every
language Core supports on the live CD leads to a lot of space usage and
wanting to strip down the content of /usr/share/locale.  Instead of just
nuking them in a post script, having a way to get anaconda to set %
_install_langs isn't unreasonable, as long as it's not really being
exposed in the UI of anaconda
* What to do with firstboot?  Do we want to show it at all, only do a
subset of the config options?
* How well does the X autoconfig work currently?  I seem to remember it
was working okay, so this might not be a huge concern

That's a start based on my hazy memory at this point.  And I'm willing
to help people with any of them, but I definitely don't have time to
drive them forward at this point.

Jeremy