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

[David Huff]

Alan Pevec wrote:
> Hi guys,
> 
> so I was working on making livecd-tools more usable on EL-5 (RHEL5 and 
> friends)

good stuff.....

> 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.

Sounds like a reasonable approach I try to grab the code and do some 
testing today and tomorrow.  My test boxes are down while they relocate 
my cube so not sure how much I can get done today.

> 
> 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
> 

Let us know if there is any thing we can do to help out here.

-D