On 04/08/2014 02:41 PM, Matthew Miller wrote:
On Tue, Apr 08, 2014 at 12:59:18PM -0500, Jim Perrin wrote:
Adam/Matt, could you provide some detail as to the benefits of appliance-tools, and the capabilities?
Wellllllll. We are actively migrating away from appliance tools, actually. the two benefits were:
- uses a standard input format we are all familiar with (kickstart)
so that's pretty much the same as what we're doing now then.
- integrated into koji for builds (so we get the repeatability and traceability benefits that brings)
and we're not using koji for the core builds.
Now with Koji 1.9, we have an anaconda/imagefactory toolchain, which has these advantages:
- also uses kickstart
- appliance-creator in maintenance mode only, anaconda actively developed
- even better koji integration (tarball outputs for docker to take in)
But, I think even that is intermediary. There is preliminary work on an idea which uses rpm in mock as the build format:
Since el6 will still be current/relevant to us for quite some time, would this new method be able to create el6 images as well?
- uses a standard input format we are all familiar with (spec files)
- much lighter weight than anaconda
- in active development
- can handle _layered_ images
- will be integrated with koji (i think also through imagefactory)
The nice thing here is that the output format (and fedbus messages) should be the same if we make this second transition in the future, so the koji -> docker registry bits can be the same.