Re: [Dragora-users] Distribution of ARM rootfs tarballs

[Matias Fonzo]

El 2020-01-29 16:50, Kevin "The Nuclear" Bloom escribió:
> Hi,

Hello Kevin.  :-)

> Those of us who have a C201 know that installation on this device is
> quite nontraditional. Instead of booting off of a USB stick and running
> an installer, one must do it manually by loading an sd card (or usb
> stick) with a special kernel partition and a special root
> partition. What this means is that creating an ISO for this machine is
> pointless. Due to that, most distros that support the machine have a
> rootfs tarball that you unpack into the root partition and, normally,
> inside of /boot there is a linux.kpart or something that gets written 
> to
> the kernel partition using `dd`.

Okay.  Question: what format would be appropriate for create the 
rootfs?.

> That being said, I'm curious as to how we wish to handle the
> distribution of Dragora 3 rootfs tarballs for this machine. Most
> distros' tarball is quite small and only contains the core system with
> simple network tools such as wpa-supplicant for connecting the machine
> to the internet (there is no Ethernet port, so wpa will be
> required). Once the core system is booted the user is expected to
> install the rest of the system via their package manager. Since Dragora
> doesn't have a package repo that contains precompiled binaries (that 
> I'm
> aware of), I'm not sure how we want to do this.

Here we could say that Dragora's "kernel" includes everything needed to 
boot the system, as well as the network part, including the 
wpa_supplicant currently.  As for the packages, we can say that the 
official packages are provided and distributed after each release[1].  
In this sense, it is not a high priority (for me) to provide updates to 
pre-compiled packages like any other pre-compiled package, since the 
distribution has to be finished, or at least until it reaches the stable 
one.

[1] http://rsync.dragora.org/v3/packages/

> My idea is this: we do the same thing that other distros do, for the
> most part. Keep the tarball small and use just the core system with 
> some
> networking programs. The kernel will be in /boot under a name like
> kernel.kpart or something. Inside of the root home directory there will
> be a few different text files that contain urls to pre-compiled binary
> packages. Each file will have names that match up with the .order files
> when building D3: editors.txt, sound.txt, xorg.txt, etc. They will have
> all the programs in the orders that they need to be in to insure a safe
> installation. Then, the user uses a few commands to download and 
> install
> each package (probably something with wget that passes the binary into 
> a
> qi command). Once they've installed all the stuff they need, they'll be
> good to go!

What I see here is that it is possible that the kernel configuration 
needs to be adjusted[2], in addition to testing it (very important), I 
do not own such a computer, and if I did, I would not have enough time 
now to focus exclusively on this, considering all that needs to be done. 
 I keep thinking about how these lists will facilitate the installation 
of the packages (how to produce them from Qi), for the moment you can 
compile the core[3] and produce the rootfs, then compile the rest to get 
the packages...

[2] 
http://git.savannah.nongnu.org/cgit/dragora.git/plain/archive/kernel/config-c201-v7
[3] 
http://git.savannah.nongnu.org/cgit/dragora.git/plain/recipes/00-core.order

> Let me know if this is a good idea or if it need tweaked at all! This 
> is
> quite a lot of work for only 1 machine but it's the only way I can 
> think
> of other than just having all that stuff in the tarball but that would
> make it very large.

I will try to assist you and provide you with what you need.

> Thanks,
>
> Kev