[OpenIndiana-discuss] Buildable distro?

[Reginald Beardsley]

--- On Wed, 2/6/13, Jim Klimov <jimklimov at cos.ru> wrote:

> From: Jim Klimov <jimklimov at cos.ru>
> Subject: Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] Buildable distro?
> To: openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org
> Date: Wednesday, February 6, 2013, 9:03 AM
> On 2013-02-06 15:27, Stefan
> Müller-Wilken wrote:
> > Well, I understand your grudge. I feel the same
> regarding the kernel itself. When linux can be built using
> "make dep clean all", then why must it be a major endeavor
> with IL/OI?

It's not a grudge.  It's an assertion that there is lots of help available if the barrier to entry is lowered.

> >
> > But on the other hand, that's how Linux started back in
> the day, too. First distributions were a hell to set up but
> improved over time. If you can improve things just a
> fraction, then that's okay. Better than giving up. So, was
> the description on OI wiki outdated? What bit was missing?

To know I'd have to successfully setup a build environment from scratch.  I'm not interested in doing that.

> 
> 
> One thing Reg mentioned may be my "fault" - the mention of
> zones in
> conjunction with illumos compilation. I think the Wiki says
> this,
> and I'd rather make it clear here again: this is not a
> requirement,
> but a suggestion in order to keep your day-to-day working
> environment
> in the global zone separate from the experiments in the
> build zones.
> Certainly, it can all be done without zones, and without
> dedicated
> datasets, etc. It is just that I like to compartmentalize
> things
> like these - for fun or benefit (i.e. to use snapshots and
> clones
> or rollbacks as needed), so I shared my procedure. For a
> simple
> build, and for a novice wanting to just get it done once,
> those
> extra suggestions were maybe an overkill. Still, there are
> commands
> to copy-paste and go on, or skip and go on - so why not? ;)

I think it's a very sound design.  If I had an easy way to set something like that up I'd be much more inclined to goof off working on OI.

> 
> As for the private OI distro-making - I asked this last week
> or so,
> and am still eager to see a 1-2-3 howto ;)
> 

With LBA disk, things should actually be easier than they used to be.  We should be able to create a slice w/ the correct number of 4k sectors and image it w/ dd.  Right now I don't think you can do that reliably because of the minor disk utility problems I'd like to fix. I certainly imaged a lot of disks 20 years ago using dd and a golden drive. There are certainly more elegant methods, but I tend to like simple and reliable.  Sticking a fixed size 10 GB image on a slice of a 2 TB drive should not be a big deal.

Rereading this leads me to ask the following:

Why can't a custom distro be just a disk image created w/ dd dumped into a slice which is as large or larger?  Is there so much metadata stored that this won't work anymore?  If that's the case, we ought to be able to script fixing it if we know where it is.

The LiveCD is great, but there are problems it doesn't solve and sometimes what you really need is just a copy of something that works.

Have Fun!
Reg