[Thincrust-devel] livecd-tools for EL-5

[Alan Pevec]

Hi guys,

so I was working on making livecd-tools more usable on EL-5 (RHEL5 and friends)
I started with livecd-tools found in EPEL http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewvc//rpms/livecd-tools/EL-5/
This one starts with livecd-tools-013.tar.bz2 tarball adding few compat patches to make it run on EL-5.
It turns out that tarball is _not_ 013 release but actually a tarball of complete git checkout somewhere between 013 and 014. To untangle this, I created livecd fork git repo http://repo.or.cz/w/livecd/EPEL5.git

tag livecd-tools-013-8-EPEL5 marks the content of the above tarball and EPEL RPM patches are imported till tag 
livecd-tools-013-8-EPEL5-patches
On top of that, I've backported some upstream changes, like pxeboot support.
I've also added --global-config as an experimental feature, it should allow using rhnplugin (untested).

But this approach isn't workable in the long run, livecd-tools were changed and refactored too much and it's already more than 10 patches in RPM.

So second approach was to start with livecd tip and forward port EL-5 compat patches: http://repo.or.cz/w/livecd/EL-5.git - tag EL-5-proposed-start marks the start of EL-5 compat patches.
NOTE: this git repo is experimental and might get rebased to track upstream livecd changes
Main EL-5 compat patches are:
- python 2.4 compat syntax
- get mayflower back, since we can't upgrade mkinitrd RPM
- import newer pykickstart (included as git submodule)

I believe this approach is less maintenance burden, as upstream progresses we just need to keep forward-porting above 3 patches and get new fixes/features for free. It also makes appliance-tools for EL-5 easier, Fedora10 version would just work.

Please review the patches and tell me what do you think.
As a first step, I would push 013 based patches (EPEL5.git) to EPEL and then ask maintainers if they're willing to jump to 018.

BTW, I've asked livecd upstream to open a branch for EPEL but didn't get any response yet, hence I started using repo.or.cz

Alan Pevec