[Fedora-livecd-list] non-vfat msdos usb sticks, persistence, misc... was Re: [PATCH] disable mksquashfs progress bar for non-interactive sessions

[Douglas McClendon]

Jeremy Katz wrote:
> On Sun, 2007-09-23 at 20:31 -0400, Jeremy Katz wrote:
>> On Sun, 2007-09-23 at 05:31 -0500, Douglas McClendon wrote:
>>> This patch introduces a global variable 'interactive' which is defined
>>> as true if stdout of livecd-creator is attached to a tty.  This global
>>> is then used to add the -no-progress option to mksquashfs for
>>> non-interactive sessions.  Thus making logfiles created by redirecting
>>> the output of livecd-creator, reasonably readable (e.g. with less).
>> I'm not sure how useful it really is as a global when we're using it for
>> one thing.  If we find more places that we want it, I might be convinced
>> to make it more generally accessible, but until then, it just feels a
>> little bit like polluting the namespace.
>>
>> Also, the more pythonic way to check is looking at sys.stdout.isatty()
>> rather than os.isatty(Fdno) -- makes it a little bit more obvious to
>> those who don't instinctively know "well duh, fd 1 is stdout"

yeah, that sounds better.  As did the loop.max_loop choice.

> And done in my local tree[1] while moving mksquashfs into its own
> function.  This adds the advantage of we don't need to copy around the
> hack of setting PWD in the environment as we have more than one place
> that we execute mksquashfs now.

Note, I forgot to do an os.unlink of osmin from build_dir/data after its 
mksquashfs.  So until you do that, an extra 10kb or so is wasted with an 
extra copy in the main squashfs.

I won't try to offer a patch as I'm sure you can do it easily, and with 
the layout flux...  I'd suggest... hmm...  msdos(not vfat) sticks?...

Is it really worth supporting msdos-nonvfat filesystems?  Is any stick 
that isn't meant to be capable of holding an mp3 with a beyond 8.3 
filename really worth supporting?  Do sticks/cards often come 
preformatted that way?  (  maybe they do... :(  )

Clearly that would shoot down the last of my layout changes that adds 
the fslabel to the squashfs.img filename (unless you fell back to 
checking for the shorter version).

I had been thinking given that naming scheme, that this new file should 
fit in similarly as fslabel.squashfs.mininst.img (or something).

Finally, just a heads up, the remaining patches you might see soon, are 
the zenity-isotodisk, and a resend of the overlay/persistence.  I think 
the latter might be worth considering applying before the devel freeze 
because

a) it's such a useful feature,

b) it could/would/should be turned off by default(for F8),

c) it does actually work as long as you shutdown cleanly, and

d) we do have plenty of time to fix bugs with it and make it more 
robust, or as a contingency, easily extricate it before F8.

-dmc