[Fedora-livecd-list] RFC- mayflower flexibility enhancements

[Jeremy Katz]

On Sun, 2007-08-12 at 23:13 -0500, Douglas McClendon wrote:
> I have a few changes I'd like to request to mayflower.  I'd like to get 
> some feedback before actually laying down the effort of producing patches.

So from a big high-level point of view, I'd really rather _not_ add lots
more that people depend on from mayflower.  Having two different
codebases to handle the initramfs (mayflower + mkinitrd) is incredibly
painful for having to adapt both for changes in the OS, etc.  

And given that overall mkinitrd "does more", I think it's going to be
better to get the live image specific stuff integrated into mkinitrd
rather than spending a lot of time making mayflower more flexible for
the sake of flexibility.

But to comment on the concepts...

> #1 - mayflower.conf - add PROGRAMS and FILES
[snip]
> FILES+= would differ from PROGRAMS, in that the auto shared library 
> dependency check would not apply to them.  Maybe that doesn't matter, 
> and you could just have FILES.

Having two different lists is just asking for people to pick the wrong
one.  Since I can't think of a real reason that you'd want a binary
without its deps, just lump them together.

> #2 - support user specified mayflower.conf location
> (i.e. not just /etc/mayflower.conf)

Not terribly against or for this.  Having the ability to specify config
locations is often useful enough for writing test cases that it's
worthwhile

> #3 - optional program, sort of like existing shell cmdline arg
> 
> Have a cmdline argument of program= and eprogram= which would cause the 
> specified program to be executed.  program= would happen right after the 
> current shell, and eprogram would happen right after the current eshell.

Why not just use init= ?  Other than the fact that doing so is currently
broken with mayflower (... see above comments about two implementations
of the same thing :-)

Jeremy