[CentOS] Re: Jigdoes of CentOS 4.4 and 5.0 i386/x86_64 CD/DVD available.

Tue Apr 17 04:14:25 UTC 2007
Maciej Zenczykowski <maze at cela.pl>

>> >  I can also use it to construct a DVD image from my CDs.
>>  So what am I missing here ? does jidgo really do a new buildinstall and
>>  rerun hd-metadata in the distro ?
>
> Lance just pointed out to me tht jidgo works using a rdiff like logic, which 
> makes sense I suppose.

To be precise it only actually cares about the files on a CD (ie. it 
doesn't use the iso image - it uses the loopback-mounted iso image just 
like if it was another directory on your hard disk).

Jigdo basically splits any (big) file into pieces which it can't find 
anywhere (these it sticks in the template file), and the pieces which are 
whole files taken from somewhere else (these then just get embedded as 
ptrs in the jigdo/template combination with Base64 MD5 checksums to ensure 
correctness).  And the entire image is MD5 checksummed.  So all the stuff 
that is unique to the iso image (cd or dvd) ends up in the template (ie. 
the iso directory structure, etc...).

For example based on the size of the jigdo template files you can guess 
that while most of the centos/x.x/os/arch directories where copies of the 
DVDs, the 4.4 i386 directory is a copy of the CDs.  (you can tell this by 
comparing the size of the template files for the CD DVD editions, smaller 
means closer match).  The CD and DVD editions are slightly different 
because they differ in the locations of files on the media (ie. all on one 
vs. all on many), so the file contents listing files are different.

Anyway - enough of this - I've been writing to much...

Maciej