[gentoo-soc] Gentoo Anaconda progress report: 2011-07-04

[wiktor w brodlo]

Hey 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.

*Progress so far*

As the time allocated as the first term is almost up, things are
likely to break in catastrophic ways, so watch out fellow developers
;-)

So far, most of the customs screens for Anaconda are done. I only have
to finish the screen responsible for picking your USE flags, the
screen for cron and syslog, and the screen for picking if you want an
X server and if so, which DE/WM would you like. Then I have to fix a
bug appearing at the end of the installation (I have had to modify the
Sabayon's installation method files to fit Gentoo – I need to bring
some of that code back).

The USE, cron and syslog settings shouldn't take more than two or
three hours each (the screens are already designed in Glade, I just
need to code what they're meant to do and extend Anaconda's
installation storage). X server will surely take some more time as
it's not designed yet (only on paper). For now, however, only
preliminary support for installing an X server will exist – I have
plenty of time next term to polish off any problems remaining with
installing Xorg and DEs/WMs.

Saying that, I already have a list of issues that need to be taken
care of next term (though they don't impede the workings of the
installer, just making it easier to maintain).
Right now Anaconda needs roughly 60 MB of extra space on the LiveDVD,
excluding a stage3 tarball. This is because of several issues. One is
that some packages on the LiveDVD are old and emerging Anaconda
upgrades them (because they are a dependency). I also need to have an
up-to-date Portage tree available (need to sync either before or
during the installation) for picking a profile and USE flags, and in
order to emerge the newest versions of packages instead of having the
user have to upgrade all the packages after they reboot (even the
handbook syncs the portage tree during installation!). Overall, I
think a good estimate is roughly 400 MB of extra space will be
required, including both stage3 tarballs (amd64 and i686). A Portage
tree will have to be synced into the live tmpfs and this is also where
the stage3 trees need to be extracted so we'll also need around 900 MB
of tmpfs space for an unpacked stage3 and a fresh portage tree. Of
course there's nothing stopping the installer from simply downloading
an appropriate stage3 tree from a mirror.

We could just put unpacked stage3 trees on the LiveDVD and use the
Portage tree from the  LiveDVD but if LiveDVDs are only released every
year then there might be some huge discrepancies, esp. in fast-paced
project. Imagine have to wait two days for Anaconda to install KDE on
your computer, only to be told you have to wait another three days
because a newer KDE was released two months ago. I am inviting
everyone to discuss those issues.

The possible solutions the above issues (not mutually exclusive):
1. make a small overlay of all the packages Anaconda can install
(there will only really be a few) and only sync that before the
installation;
2. pull a fresh stage3 from a mirror (only roughly 150 MB for amd64,
probably a little bit less for i686), and instead of extracting it to
the tmpfs and having Anaconda copy it later on the disk, have Anaconda
extract it straight onto the new system image.

I would love to hear many opinions regarding these issues.

Get to work, we've only got a week left! ;-)

~ wiktor