RFC: How to improve Ubuntu support

[Moritz Struebe]

Am 2014-11-05 um 18:55 schrieb Thomas Lange:
>>>>>> On Tue, 04 Nov 2014 09:37:28 +0100, Moritz Struebe <Moritz.Struebe at informatik.uni-erlangen.de> said:
>     > Currently I see the following ways of improving things:
>
>     > * Get the FAI-Project at launchpad[1] up to date.
> Nice. I will contact someone, that can give you write access to the
> launchpad page.

Oh, I already have access.. ;)

>
>     > I can do this, but it would be nice to have that extra branch with
>     > releases to automate the process (see my other mail)
> But creating a branch called release is not enough IMO. You'll have to
> apply some patches to make a release for Ubuntu. For e.g. package and repository
> names are different. How do you want to handle the diffs between the
> original FAI sources and the Ubuntu version of FAI?

Well, actually it isn't that bad. Currently I'm building nightlies from
the official trunk [1] and have an extra release branch in my own repo
for my "release"-ppa [2]. The latter is in productive use. We are not
using the server-package though, as we have our own tftp/nfs server.
I think we can take care of almost all issues at packaging time as
described in [3]. The only real adjustments required by the PPA are
adding the PPA's URL and it's key to config and nfsroot. And using some
"dpkg madison" + "apt-add-repository" - magic this should be possible in
a generic way, too - even for your own repo.


>
>     > * Improve the example configuration
>     > I see two ways of doing this. First make a second example "Ubuntu" or
>     > just add all the necessary changes in comments. As one should look
>     > through the configuration anyway this might be the solution that is
>     > easiest to maintain.
> We already have a package_config/UBUNTU in FAI. Is this not
> sufficient? Sure the repository URLs are different for Ubuntu, but
> this should be done in the FAI package for Ubuntu.

Yes, your are right. I was thinking this through while reading [4] and
somehow my brain went down the wrong road - our own config, which I
inherited, is too far away from that example....

>
>     > * NFSROOT
>     > Ok, this is the one giving my the biggest headache. One solution would
>     > be to add an extra folder or something. IMO the nicer solution would be
>     > adapt the way the fai-client is working: Add a script that detects the
>     > right classes and use that to select the files. This would allow to not
>     > only manage those file on a distro-basis, but also on a release-bases.
>     > In the end it is possible to manage multiple nfs roots with the same
>     > config folder and the only file that needs to be adjusted is the
>     > nfsroot.conf.
> I'm not sure if I understand you correctly. Please give more details
> about your thoughts.
>
> Currently fai-setup and fai-make-nfsroot can be called with -C
> /etc/fai-ubuntu or something similar.
Yes, that is what we are currently doing. None the less, this can be
reduced to adjusting the path for deboostrap. From there on the
sources.list and the packages for that distro can be selected
"automatically". Thus instead of passing a folder, one would only pass a
single file.

Cheers
Morty



[1] https://launchpad.net/~morty/+archive/ubuntu/fai
[2] https://launchpad.net/~morty/+archive/ubuntu/fai-release
[3]
http://raphaelhertzog.com/2010/09/27/different-dependencies-between-debian-and-ubuntu-but-common-source-package/
[4] http://wiki.fai-project.org/wiki/Installing_Ubuntu_Linux_with_FAI

-- 
Dipl.-Ing. Moritz 'Morty' Struebe (Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter)
Lehrstuhl für Informatik 4 (Verteilte Systeme und Betriebssysteme)
Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
Martensstr. 1
91058 Erlangen

Tel   : +49 9131 85-25419
Fax   : +49 9131 85-28732
eMail : struebe at informatik.uni-erlangen.de
WWW   : https://www4.cs.fau.de/~morty



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