[gentoo-soc] Gentoo Anaconda: pre-mid-term report

[wiktor w brodlo]

Howdy Gentooers!


*Intro*

Gentoo Anaconda is a fork of Sabayon Anaconda which is a fork of
Fedora/Red Hat Anaconda. Anaconda is an installer for Linux disros,
originally for Fedora/RH but now it's distro-independent and many
other distros use it as their installer. Sabayon is a binary distro
based on Gentoo.


This report will try to sum up the first term and what are the plans
for the future.

So far everything the installer is on time and does all the things
that it was meant to do according to the proposal. Some things were
simplified, others required more work than I expected; however,
overall the installer does now install a working Gentoo with an X
server and a desktop environment (the latter might be buggy at times
as I've not yet had a chance to test all the DEs).

The future.
While developing this early release, I was making a list of
improvements and things I would like to see in the installer as well
as other tasks which I felt are not essential to produce a working
installer. Here are some of the points:
- Bump all Fedora packages to the newest versions. There are a few
packages from the Fedora projects and Sabayon's ebuilds refer to quite
aged versions – I'd like to bump as many of them as possible to Fedora
Core 15.
- Port the libiscsi patch to a never version of OpeniSCSI. The current
version is not only old, the ebuild uses an old EAPI which now forbids
multiple Python versions. Need to fix that.
- Do something about FCoE. I couldn't get this package to compile at
all on Gentoo (and I've noticed it was once available in Portage, then
it was removed because of the same reason). Since Anaconda allows
installing on FCoE storage, it would be useful to finally fix this
package. For now, I have faked FCoE checking (it always returns no
available storage).
- Compare the sabayonlive-tools package with what's already in baselayout.
- Automatically sync Portage and download a new stage3.
- Make the screens prettier ;-), and add a welcome screen as well as
chapter intro screens.
- (that could be considered as part of the previous point) Use a tree
instead of a list on the mirror selection screen.
- Break up copying of the Portage tree so that the user can see its
progress (now it looks like the installer has frozen)
- Tune the minimum filesystem size checking.
- Do something about the massive list of dependencies. Because of the
way Anaconda worked originally (simply copying the rootfs of the
medium it was installing from), Sabayon made all the tools Anaconda
needs *inside the new system* dependencies of Anaconda. Some of those
tools are not required to run Anaconda, and some are never even
touched by Anaconda – they need to be installed on the new system
before Anaconda proceeds with configuration. I want to hunt them all
down and remove them from the dependency list to keep the size of the
installer to the minimum
- Clean up dead code. Anaconda contains a lot of code that Gentoo
never uses, like yum/RPM support, different repositories etc. I want
to remove the unused code to make Anaconda more manageable. I have
also commented out a lot of code because I thought I'll never use it
but left it there just in case – and this code turned out to be
unneeded at all so I'll remove it.
As a long-term goal, I'd like to move all the packages from
anaconda-overlay to the official Portage tree. Some of the packages
are already there, like GRUB and OpeniSCSI but Anaconda needs some
specific patches for these packages to work – in such case I'd like to
add the patches. I'm looking for volunteers that would like to
maintain some of these packages – there are 24 packages in the tree
and I don't think I'll be able to maintain them all AND the installer
(of course some of them will be removed/merged).

I was also talking to Hexxeh on IRC about a possible merge of some our
our projects' backends, but that's still a long time away, if ever.

Wishing you all passing the midterm :)

~  w.