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Replying to list after checking with Dmitry he meant to email the list:<br>
<br>
On 07/06/10 08:45, Dmitry Nedospasov wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid:4C0C2515.3020201@nedos.net" type="cite">
<pre wrap="">On 6.6.10 23:36, Nathan O'Sullivan wrote:
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">I've also committed some changes yesterday to support OpenSUSE 11.2
along with the xen-tools hook directory. I guess one potential issue
with Kickstart is it seems Suse do not support it, and instead have
something called "AutoYaST" instead.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">
Hmm, but atleast OpenSUSE/SLES provides xen images to install "domUs".
Thats primarily the idea i had behind what I'm calling kickstart, as
this is done via kickstart on RHEL/CentOS. Again the idea was to script
unattended installations for systems for which we don't have something
similar to debootstrap.
One advantage I saw personally, is that many larger organizations run
RHEL, and I think that xen-tools would appeal to them if it could
install RHEL well and CentOS as its derivative.
</pre>
</blockquote>
I guess that gets to the core of why someone wants to use xen-tools.<br>
<br>
Personally, I started using it as a way to build minimal operating
system images that I can archive and duplicate, and most the
Xen-specific parts (like writing configuration files) are useless to
me. I realise I'm in the minority though (surely?).<br>
<br>
debootstrap / rinse + xen-tools is great for me because of the minimal
images it makes.<br>
<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:4C0C2515.3020201@nedos.net" type="cite">
<pre wrap="">
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">For those who aren't familiar with Rinse - its main problem is it
downloads and extracts a bunch of packages (from a list stored in a
rinse configuration) directly via rpm, which has two impacts:
- the yum database is unaware that any packages have been installed, and
- this download-and-extract process doesn't respect dependencies known
by yum either.
Due to the dependency issue, each new OS release you have to update the
package list with maybe 5 new packages, to add any new library
dependencies of yum itself.
The badness here is that you can/will end up with some packages that are
on-disk, but not known by yum to be "installed", so "yum update" will
not install new versions as they're released. This can be worked around
to some degree by installing a few common packages with yum (such as yum
itself), which will trigger quite large dependency chains and pull in a
good hundred or so basic packages.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">
Hmm, thanks for this investigation, i might pull your branch and take a
look... maybe using the techniques that febootstrap uses (its just a yum
wrapper) to improve on the code that we already have.
I still see a problem in lack of manpower to cover this... rinse needs
atleast one active dev and I'm not sure that any of us are willing to be
that dev atm.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
I guess that depends what we consider wrong with it. I will continue to
patch it to work with new releases of Centos/fedora/opensuse for the
forseeable future, but I cant see myself fixing much else.<br>
<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:4C0C2515.3020201@nedos.net" type="cite">
<pre wrap="">
What really surprises me is that Steve didn't do (and what i plan to do
when i have more time) is abstract xen-tools and rinse to a point where
it can install KVM vms, or in my case QEMU guests.
</pre>
</blockquote>
That would certainly be useful to me personally; at the moment when
xen-create-image is finished I mount its disk.img, make a tarball of
its contents, and then delete everything xen-create-image did.<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:4C0C2515.3020201@nedos.net" type="cite">
<pre wrap="">
Do we have rinse in a git somewhere? I'd have to begin reading the
mercurial manual before I'd be able to check anything out from hg ;)
</pre>
</blockquote>
I've imported it into gitorious over the weekend -
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<a href="http://gitorious.org/rinse/rinse">http://gitorious.org/rinse/rinse</a><br>
<br>
Regards<br>
Nathan<br>
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