On Wed, Apr 17, 2024 at 7:27 PM Kevin Fenzi <kevin(a)scrye.com> wrote:
On Wed, Apr 17, 2024 at 09:41:14AM GMT, Peter Boy wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> Here is my attempt at a brief summary as a starting point for our further
discussion.
>
> At our first video meeting, we arrived at an approach to create all installation
media with one tool if possible. Kiwi is obviously the tool of choice at the moment.
Well, I am not sure thats completely possible. :)
pungi is the tool that does composes, it in turn fires off other things
in koji to build things and collects the results.
It gathers repos and sets them up and then generates the boot.iso /
netinstall iso. It has to do that because later things need that to
build, so I am not sure kiwi could generate that iso (or that we want it
to).
> I think there are several steps to be taken now:
>
> 1.
> We should try Kiwi, preferably with our VM image. There is already a template from
the Cloud WG. Here's what came to mind:
> (a) Apparently Kiwi does not use kickstart files. How does this work with Anaconda?
Yeah, it uses descriptions (xml currently) instead.
See:
https://pagure.io/fedora-kiwi-descriptions/tree/rawhide
It doesn't use anaconda to do the install, it sets things up, installs
the packages and configures things itself.
David Duncan and I (as well as other members jointly in Cloud and
Server WGs) can help with porting over your images from ImageFactory
to Kiwi if you want to go this route.
> b) What happens to our PXE network installation?
I think that doesn't change and is still made with pungi calling lorax.
It is technically possible to make PXE and UEFI netboot images with
kiwi, but I haven't gotten around to implementing an installer image
yet (it's lower on my list). But Lorax isn't the problem ImageFactory
is, so it's not high on my priorities.
> c) Do we have a "playing field" on Koji where we can
experiment, or should we install our own Kiwi instance, e.g. on the server where I had
developed our VM with ImageFactory (and where we can all have access, as with the Wildfly
server)?
You can actually run kiwi locally...
https://osinside.github.io/kiwi/quickstart.html
Kiwi is packaged in Fedora and EPEL. Fedora specific instructions are
in the README for fedora-kiwi-descriptions:
https://pagure.io/fedora-kiwi-descriptions
> 2.
> We should contact the other editions, and especially RelEng, to coordinate the
course of action. RelEng is currently busy with F40. We can only start with it after its
release.
Yep. Sounds good.
> 3.
> Another consideration is time. Currently, F41 is built in Rawhide as before, so it
will certainly be released that way. The question is whether we want to continue
publishing our iso files unchanged (and with errors). One possibility would be to at least
remove the difference between DVD and netboot. We have to look at their build steps
anyway, whether with the current tools or with Kiwi. The logic should be the same.
>
> This leads to at least 3 alternatives for the next steps we take.
>
> 1. we wait until F40 is published and then contact RelEng about the options for the
best way forward.
Yeah, that sounds reasonable...
> 2. we meet for another video meeting, e.g. next week, and spend some time trying out
Kiwi and looking at it in detail.
>
> 3. we wait with Kiwi for the discussion with RelEng and the other editions and try
in a next meeting specifically to determine the differences between DVD and netbook and to
test how big a modified DVD file would become (this would be our issue #32 [1], 2 years
old.
>
> Can anyone think of any other ways?
>
> We should decide what we want to do next and when. One option would be another video
session on Wednesday, April 24.
If thats right at release time, I probibly can't make it... but after
f40 is out and a bit of time to handle backlog we can start working on
f41 changes. :)
Kiwi cannot *currently* be used to build the install DVD or the
netinstall ISOs. That process is special and currently only exists in
Lorax. So for now, the only bits that you could reasonably port over
are your VM and ARM disk images.
--
真実はいつも一つ!/ Always, there's only one truth!