some remarks about fai 2.6, especialy on powerpc

[Holger Levsen]

Hi,

I just installed fai-2.6 in a sarge chroot on two woody machines (one i386, 
one powerpc), here are my remarks:

The fai package recommends: syslinux and suggests: mknbi - both are i386 only. 
It would be nice (if possible) if these were arch-spezific.

The default values of FAI_LOCATION (/usr/local/share/fai) and NFSROOT 
(/usr/lib/fai/nfsroot) violate FHS 2.2. Should be /var/lib/fai/config and 
/var/lib/fai/nfsroot, where I would even prefer /var/lib/fai/nfsroot/$ARCH
Thomas, we've already talked about this and FHS 2.3 (which is current, but not 
used in sarge) says, FAI should use the new /srv-hierarchy instead, so you 
said, you don't want to change the paths to not confuse people who are used 
to FAI twice. I really think /usr/local/share/fai is a serious bug against 
debian policies - but if noone else complains I won't submit it as a serious 
bug.

Line 36 in /etc/fai/make-fai-nfsroot.conf says "# following lines should be 
read only for you" - this is obviously (see below) only true if using i386.

/usr/share/doc/fai/README.package_problems is mostly outdated and thus 
confusing / frightening, esp. after "The following table describes the 
problems with postinstall scripts." - I would suggest a rewrite.

/usr/share/doc/links.html could include " * FAI on linux for powerpc: 
http://www.layer-acht.org/fai" - I definitly update that page in future! and 
even before sarge is released ;-)

Regarding the package fai-kernels I came up with the idea of making it 
arch-independed - with arch-specific kernel packages included. So we could 
start with three/four? packages inside (kernel-image.debs for i386, ppc, 
sparc and maybe amd64) - there is a working kernel-image.deb for ppc on 
layer-acht.org already, although at the moment it's to big to fit on a 
floppy. (fine for booting from net, hd or cd)

packages.qa.debian.org/fai says "The package should be updated to follow the 
last version of Debian Policy (Standards-Version 3.6.1 instead of 3.5.6)."

In /etc/fai/make-fai-nfsroot.conf for powerpc I had to prepend 
FAI_DEBOOTSTRAP_OPTS slightly differently: FAI_DEBOOTSTRAP_OPTS="--arch 
powerpc 
--exclude=grub,lilo,dmidecode,read-edid,hwtools,pcmcia-cs,ppp,pppconfig,pppoe,pppoeconf,dhcp-client,exim4,exim4-base,exim4-config,exim4-daemon-light,mailx,at,fdutils,info,modconf,libident,logrotate,exim"

To packages for powerpc I had to add "quik yaboot" (powerpc bootloaders).

make-fai-nfsroot fails/stops after:
Creating base.tgz
mkdir: cannot create directory /var/lib/fai/nfsroot/var/state': File exists
No diversion Diversion of /sbin/discover-modprobe by fai', none removed

Unfortunatly I don't have the time _now_ (maybe tonite, hopefully tomorrow) to 
look further into it, why this happens. make-fai-nfsroot on i386 worked just 
fine here.


so far, so good ;-)
regards,
	Holger

P.S.: I'll keep an eye on these problems/issues and submit regular bug reports 
within the next days if neccessary.