State of Red Hat support?

[Henning Sprang]

Hi Axel,

On Mon, 2005-12-05 at 16:56 +0100, Axel Thimm wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> some time ago there was some momentum towards adding rpm support to
> fai. I think the goal was Mandrake or SuSE. If any of these rpm based
> distros make it to become fai-ified, the next will be simply adjusting
> some parameters I guess.

_when_

As you might have seen, I finally had time to look into the stuff
Florent did - he did a proof of concept that it's generally possible to
install an rpm-based distribution.
I wrote a longish list of questions concerning his implementation, which
he did not yet reply to.
I also started to try what he did, noting each additional step that was
necessary to get his stuff going. I was not yet successful - but I think
I am about an hour or two away from it, but had no time yet to finish
that. Plus, when I wanted to get back at it last week, I couldn't find
these detailed docs - sorry, they could help you to get you at my
current state for installing a mandriva system.

If that proof of cpncept will generally work, there will some things be
needed to do:

- scripts to create the base images for the different distributions,
also on Debian or other distributions
- better integration of Florent's work into FAI (config's, only one
make-fai-nfsroot script)
- maybe a slightly better design of that work, for example I don't think
we need an extra NFSRoot for each distribution.
- the scripts for base-<DISTRIBUTION>.tgz generation should be run
independently of make-fai-nfsroot

> What is the status? Is there an actual demand, or is it just
> nice-to-have, but a ton of things are more important?
> 

I wanna do it, for fun, but it can take a while, and I guess if it's
there, lot of people will use it - but not many people seem to be
interested enough to also work on it. It could be a question of a
man-month or two to get all the above nicely going.

Henning