[CentOS-devel] Jigdoes of CentOS 4.4 and 5.0 i386/x86_64 CD/DVD available.

[Maciej Żenczykowski]

Reposting original message from CentOS mailing list for further
discussion with developers and QA deep (per instructions).
---

I've gone through the trouble (after some 10 rounds I finally have
something I'm happy with) and generated jigdo/template files for
CentOS 5.0 iso's (CD/DVD i386/x86_64) (and CentOS 4.4 while I was at it:
CD/DVD/ServerCD SRPMS/i386/x86_64).

(and I started on this before the thread about creating the DVD's from the
CD's started ;-) )

They are available at:
http://tcs.uj.edu.pl/~buildcentos/centos-jigdo/

(I skipped the LiveCD since jigdo offers no size improvement here --
already for the ServerCD the template file is 125 MBs because of the
different .img files inside the iso)

These jigdo/template files should allow you to generate any of the listed
cd/dvd isos from the publically available http://mirror.centos.org mirror
site (which is DNS-aliased to something close to you).  Jigdo will also
allow using a local source of files (ie. an existing CD, etc...)

You will need to install jigdo-file and jigdo-lite.

It is available:
- in package jigdo from dag's repository (rpmforge) for CentOS 4 (and others)
- in package jigdo-file for debian/ubuntu (just apt-get it)
- from the source website (both sources, and windows binaries, and
statically linked linux binaries) http://atterer.net/jigdo/

Once installed usage is (...should be...) trivial:

jigdo-lite --noask http://tcs.uj.edu.pl/~buildcentos/centos-jigdo/%.jigdo

which will generate the requested (replace the % with what you want, see
the http://tcs.uj.edu.pl/~buildcentos/centos-jigdo/ listing) iso file in
the directory in which you run it.

[If you have a local source of files you can skip the --noask and provide
it when asked]

Next step: get this included on the centos mirrors ;-) [hint hint]

Afterwards: it would be nice to drop the iso files from the mirrors in
their entirety and generate them on-the-fly using the JTE extensions
package.  Should be significant space-savings.  [requires perl cgi in the
hosting webserver, but should be very safe since it's all read-only
access]

Even later: it would be awesome if we could generate the jigdo/template
during mkisofs (requires using a patched mkisofs).  This would skip the
slightly painful jigdo generation step (painful - because I have to
download a local mirror of both the files and the CD/DVD images, much less
painful to do it directly on the centos source/build system/mirrors)

Both later steps are 95% there (the JTE jigit website/extensions/mkisofs
patches/etc) and mostly require putting together rpms for EL4/5.
(I'm going to be trying to put together a mkisofs-jte rpm which doesn't
override the normal mkisofs rpm, but instead provides two files -
/usr/bin/mkisofs-jte and it's manpage)

This should also allow more customized images (like the rolled up updates)
without increasing mirror space usage.

Jigdo (combined with hardlinking identical files, which I believe is
already done) should enable drastic reductions in centos HDD footprint.

Comments?

Cheers,
Maciej Zenczykowski
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