FAI Upgrade tips, questions on creating package lists

[malk at sidehack.sat.gweep.net]

> 
> >>>>> On Wed, 28 Jul 2004 21:44:29 -0400 (EDT), malk at sidehack.sat.gweep.net said:
> 
>     > I found the simple solution is to upgrade the debootstrap package on the box
>     > before calling fai-setup
> Yep. This is very important.

Cool -- perhaps you could add a note somewhere in the FAI guide
or add a file to the package called Readme.upgrade or something
to mention some prerequisites when upgrading:

- Make sure your using the latest debootstrap
- If your configs area is based on the scripts that came 
  with an older FAI release, make sure you merge in the
  updates from the master copies of the sripts in 
  /usr/share/doc/fai/example/simple / advanced.
- Re-check your variable definitions in fai.conf
  make-fai-nfsroot.conf and sources.list

I also wanted to note that the DEFAULT/S01 script that
comes with the simple example can report a failed exit
status from rc.S output if the last grep towards the
bottom happens to return a non-zero exit status yet
the script executed just fine.

Suggest simply adding an "exit 0" to the bottom of 
DEFAULT/S01 to make this cosmetic error go away.

On some of my machines, DEFAULT/S01 exits clean and
on others it falsely reports a failed status due to
the return status of the last grep.  I always feel
better about an FAI install when none of the scripts
report any errors (failed exit status).

One other question:

In the past I had installed a system w/ the regular debian
installer and picked what I wanted from taskinst (groups of
packages) to get the system installed the way I wanted.

The taskinst selections in package_config at the time didn't
seem to work with FAI no matter what I tried.  So I simply
did this on that system I installed by hand to produce the
package list I still use today:

egrep '^Package:' /var/lib/dpkg/status | awk '{print $2}' | sort > CLASS

now edit the file CLASS and add "packages INSTALL" at the top.

I would prefer to rather reduce that list of packages to the
minimum required list such that dependencies cause additional
packages to be selected at FAI time and still get the same
final list of packages installed.  Is there any easy way
to do this i.e. reduce an arbitrary large list of debian
packages to the smallest possible list of packages such that
dependencies still cause what's listed to be installed?  Such
a tool could use a local mirror to examine the dependencies
in each package an logically reduce to some minimum list.

In an effort to pair down my list, I took the various 
package groups listed in XFREE, KERNEL_SOFT, COMPILE,
GNOME etc.  and made my own class, added the openoffice
packages, kde, and few other things and the dependencies
simply would not work out.  The four openoffice packages
wouldn't install and I got frustrated and went back to my
old rather large list (after several failed FAI attempts).

I would prefer not to have to install w/ the debian installer
by hand every so often to properly update or tune my 
list -- I may try using the tasksel categories exclusively
in my package_config once again as perhaps in later sarge
releases it once again works.  tasksel categories that work
is a pretty good solution.

Is there any good utility to test your packages INSTALL
or packages TASKSEL selections before actually trying to
FAI a box and avoid the trial an error sessions trying to
get a combination of packages that will resolve nicely
with apt ??

I'm sorry if this has all be answered in the past, but I
haven't found anything that meets my needs by searching
the mailing archive and the guide and such.

Thanks again,

-Eric Malkowski

> 
>     > /var/lib/dpkg/tmp.ci/preinst: line 7: lvscan: command not found  <---------
> lvscan is in the package lvm2 but it's a link to the executable. Maybe
> this link will be created in the postinst script. So it may be a lvm2
> bug. But you can ignore it.
> 
> -- 
> regards Thomas
>