Re: [gentoo-releng] request for spec files used for building gentoo-install livecd

[Chris Gianelloni]

On Fri, 2005-09-23 at 23:50 -0700, Ted Kosan wrote:
> Chris indicated that Catalyst had to be heavily modified in order to allow it
> to build the Installer LiveCD which means that the spec files that were used
> were probably only useful with the modified version.

They won't work on the released catalyst version.  One thing that I tend
to do when creating CD images is hard-code things into catalyst to make
it do what I want.  Since I am not distributing this modified catalyst,
there's no "GPL" requirement of any sort.  The main reason I refuse to
release it is because it all is a big, ugly, dirty hack and I'd prefer
people not see such nasty code coming from me... ;]

> My thought is that the Installer spec files are probably useless without the
> modified codebase and if they were released then this would generate a flood of
> distracting questions on the Installer list asking for help on how to get them
> to work.

Correct.

> Anyway, I am also working on a LiveCD that has capabilities that are similar to
> the Installer but I have decided that the best way to do this is to take a
> slower approach, dig into the Catalyst source code and try to fully understand
> all of the pieced needed to achieve this.

This truly is the best method, as we won't bother supporting *anyone*
trying to use gentoo-release-* as livecd/type simply because the release
livecd types *assume* that you're building a Gentoo release and will do
things for you that you may or may not want.  I've created the
generic-livecd livecd/type for others to use.  This type doesn't make
these assumptions and is designed to be more flexible.  Since we don't
use these, our spec files would probably be less than helpful.

> If you are interested in using this approach too we could move this discussion
> over to the catalyst list and continue it there :-)

I look forward to helping you on the catalyst list.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead/QA Manager
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux