[Arm-dev] enough packages for a @core install ?

Tue Jun 2 09:02:03 UTC 2015
Gordan Bobic <gordan at redsleeve.org>

On 2015-06-02 09:33, Fabian Arrotin wrote:
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> On 02/06/15 03:23, cc35359 at gmail.com wrote:
>> I just read about the Google summer of code project in regards to
>> repacking/customizing arm 32 images, how does that effect what we
>> are looking to accomplish? I don't mind assisting in the rootfs
>> build (the right way), but I've never tried it in my 20 years of
>> nix :-). I'm wondering if I use my pi image, chroot into a new
>> pqrtition and do the installs in that? That sounds easy, but not
>> sure if it is that easy.

It is that easy.

A more interesting question is what packages to include. The
base image would, presumably, contain what anaconda would install
on a minimal install. In reality, however, I think it would be
useful to include at least NetworkManager-tui if not Xorg and
KDE/Gnome to make it easier to connect to the network and yum
install anything else required.

There is also the question of what FS to use. If the kernel
sources are available and the appropriate kernel rpm can be
built, I would suggest default should be XFS, same as on x86.
On RedSleeve I'm currently working on rootfs images with
zfs-fuse (over the past few years I've learned to no longer
trust anything other than ZFS with any data that takes more
than a couple of hours to restore from backups).

> Well, I don't know but it would be good if Mandar (GSoC student) and
> Ian (his Mentor) could participate and give their opinions/status
> about the current work.
> Also, let's keep in mind that we'd have to think about how to start
> from zero (so not using existing image in which we'd modify something).

In general you can use an x86 machine to yum install ARM packages into
a chroot. If there are %pre or %post scripts they will fail, but it
should still be good enough to build a base image for bootstrapping
more images.

> That can work for initial testing images, but we have to produce final
> images from scratch.

I don't see what the problem is. You can yum install into a clean
chroot directory, then copy that onto a loopback mounted clean
image directory (make sure to preserve the xattrs/caps!).

Gordan