[Fedora-livecd-list] [PATCH 6/6] Several Kernels

[Jeremy Katz]

On Mon, 2007-08-06 at 18:04 -0600, Jonathan Steffan wrote:
> It's a matter of livecd-creator not wanting to be imported and
> subclassed. Ignore that the sys.path.append() is more then nasty, but it
> does help to illustrate discussion we have had in the past around the
> time of the Fedora 7 release. The revisor team has wanted the livecd
> bits to be importable (in a similar way that pungi has allowed us to)
> and when that was denied we had to make the controversial decision to
> pull the full source into revisor. My understanding, at least this is
> what I took from the discussion, is that livecd-creator is just not
> ready to be imported and is offering nothing resembling a stable
> API/code base. This didn't bother us at all, we were willing to fix any
> issue that arises from changes in livecd-creator and the way we utilized
> the code in revisor. 

I know that you guys don't mind.  But the problem is that once it's
installed, it's open season for anyone else who might want to depend on
it also.  And it happens.  Trust me.  There are some bits that snuck
into rhpl to be "only" used by anaconda and firstboot, yet have ended up
in all kinds of other places.  Making it a lot harder to change them,
fix them or otherwise improve them.  So really, the fact that we're not
guaranteeing any sort of API is just what lets us continue to _make_
large changes, some of which you've proposed and other that have been by
others[1].  If this were all C, then interface versioning is doable and
not that painful... being python, a lot of that functionality doesn't
exist

Douglas's idea of doing a symlink if you really want to import now is
one of the best I've seen and I don't know why I didn't think about it
when we had this discussion months ago. 

Jeremy

[1] On my todo list for pre-test2 that will impact the internal API of
livecd-creator is getting the patches from dwmw2/spot merged for ppc and
sparc.  And if there's time, I do want to get back to markmc's "image
abstraction" patches as I know there's a fair bit of desire around them
as well.