El 2020-02-07 09:40, Kevin "The Nuclear" Bloom escribió:
Matias Fonzo writes:
El 2020-01-31 09:38, Kevin "The Nuclear" Bloom escribió:
Matias Fonzo writes:
El 2020-01-31 00:06, Kevin "The Nuclear" Bloom escribió:
Thanks for the quick reply, Matias. See my comments below:
El 2020-01-29 16:50, Kevin "The Nuclear" Bloom escribió:
Hi,
Hello Kevin. :-)
Those of us who have a C201 know that installation on this device
is
quite nontraditional. Instead of booting off of a USB stick and
running
an installer, one must do it manually by loading an sd card (or
usb
stick) with a special kernel partition and a special root
partition. What this means is that creating an ISO for this
machine is
pointless. Due to that, most distros that support the machine
have a
rootfs tarball that you unpack into the root partition and,
normally,
inside of /boot there is a linux.kpart or something that gets
written to
the kernel partition using `dd`.
Okay. Question: what format would be appropriate for create the
rootfs?.
Arch-arm uses tar.gz and we probably should stick to that because
some
people might be unpacking it from ChromeOS which doesn't come with
lzip
installed. It can, however, unpack gzip.
Okay, tar+gzip then.
That being said, I'm curious as to how we wish to handle the
distribution of Dragora 3 rootfs tarballs for this machine. Most
distros' tarball is quite small and only contains the core system
with
simple network tools such as wpa-supplicant for connecting the
machine
to the internet (there is no Ethernet port, so wpa will be
required). Once the core system is booted the user is expected to
install the rest of the system via their package manager. Since
Dragora
doesn't have a package repo that contains precompiled binaries
(that I'm
aware of), I'm not sure how we want to do this.
Here we could say that Dragora's "kernel" includes everything
needed to
boot
the
system, as well as the network part, including the wpa_supplicant
currently.
As
for the packages, we can say that the official packages are
provided and
distributed after each release[1]. In this sense, it is not a
high
priority
(for me) to provide updates to pre-compiled packages like any
other
pre-compiled
package, since the distribution has to be finished, or at least
until it
reaches
the stable one.
[1] http://rsync.dragora.org/v3/packages/
I think that is a good idea. Would take the stress away from trying
to
keep every package up-to-date all the time. I'm still curious about
how
we should manage downloading the binaries and then installing them
in
the correct order. Any ideas how to do this? (i.e. `wget -i
BINARY-LIST.txt | qi -i` or something)
Qi can read from standard input, for example if the file currently
contains
the
full (local) path of one or more packages, it can install them, e.g:
qi -i -
<
pkglist.txt
What you want is to read, download and install. Currently Qi has
the code to
download and generate the .sha256 on the source side. As a pending
issue, we
could use or adapt this code (as it declares the General Network
Downloader)
to
tell Qi to download the packages when using the -i option and if
"http(s)://"
is
specified on the command line.
Of course, this has to be studied to make it as reliable as possible
(.sha256,
signatures...).
That would be quite handy! If this would be valuable to the other D3
archs then I think it would be great addition, otherwise, we may want
to
just have a shell script that does this using wget+qi or
something.
In theory this was going to be part of 'jul', unfortunately Jul
doesn't
continue[1]. I prefer a separate program to do the whole remote
package
thing...
[1] http://git.savannah.nongnu.org/cgit/dragora.git/tree/testing/jul
Yes, I agree that it should be separate. I created an emacs package
called `jul-mode` back when jul was still around - it only requires jul
for the actual downloading/installing part and parses the HTML to see
what packages were available. I'm sure I could write another program
that could do the same sort of thing but use `qi` to install. We could
come up with a better way to check for packages rather than parsing
HTML
(which could be slow if we had a lot of stuff), maybe an sqlite db or
something. If there is a faster way that you know of, let me know. I
would probably write it in guile scheme since I don't know anything
about tcl.
Ideas?
If the database is binary, we are lost, this breaks with a principle of
software development in Unix-like systems. Specifically what would you
use the database for, is the sqlite database compatible with other
system tools?.
My idea is this: we do the same thing that other distros do, for
the
most part. Keep the tarball small and use just the core system
with some
networking programs. The kernel will be in /boot under a name
like
kernel.kpart or something. Inside of the root home directory
there will
be a few different text files that contain urls to pre-compiled
binary
packages. Each file will have names that match up with the .order
files
when building D3: editors.txt, sound.txt, xorg.txt, etc. They
will have
all the programs in the orders that they need to be in to insure
a safe
installation. Then, the user uses a few commands to download and
install
each package (probably something with wget that passes the binary
into a
qi command). Once they've installed all the stuff they need,
they'll be
good to go!
What I see here is that it is possible that the kernel
configuration needs
to
be
adjusted[2], in addition to testing it (very important), I do not
own such
a
computer, and if I did, I would not have enough time now to focus
exclusively
on
this, considering all that needs to be done. I keep thinking about
how
these
lists will facilitate the installation of the packages (how to
produce them
from
Qi), for the moment you can compile the core[3] and produce the
rootfs,
then
compile the rest to get the packages...
[2]
http://git.savannah.nongnu.org/cgit/dragora.git/plain/archive/kernel/config-c201-v7
[3]
http://git.savannah.nongnu.org/cgit/dragora.git/plain/recipes/00-core.order
Yes, I just completed the core build with the current master
branch. Everything went smoothly except for meson, which has always
been
a problem child on the C201. I will be creating the signed kernel
and
attempting booting tomorrow, if time permits.
Let me know if this is a good idea or if it need tweaked at all!
This is
quite a lot of work for only 1 machine but it's the only way I
can think
of other than just having all that stuff in the tarball but that
would
make it very large.
I will try to assist you and provide you with what you need.
What I can think of is that we can create a new scenario for the
bootstrapping
process. This would be a minimal system to boot and log in to, from
there
you
could install whatever you want, reusing the minimal system tools.
This
will
allow you:
- Check and test the kernel configuration.
- Save time instead of building the stage1, the whole core, etc.
- Accessible via enter-chroot.
- Have the rootfs small.
- Ready to boot.
For example, you would set the cross compiler in motion:
./boostrap -s0 -a armv7_hf
Then you would produce the minimum system using the cross compiler
for your
machine:
./bootstrap -s201 -a armv7_hf
If you already have the cross-compiler in place, you would use the
"201"
scenario/stage as many times as necessary (related changes, kernel
configuration, busybox, settings, etc.)
In time, the new produced rootfs will be adjusted to what is "just
and
necessary".
... Cum on feel the noize! ;-)
This would be great! Would it be possible to just have another
special
.order file called `base.order` or `minimal.order`? Which would just
build the essentials and some network stuff. Using the bootstrap
command
you mention would work too!
What I can think of is that we can simplify the structure of the
Dragora series.
For example, we currently have the output sorted for packages as
(default):
/var/cache/qi/packages/<arch>/<series_name>
Instead of having <series_name>, we can try to have "hashtags" for the
packages,
so we would categorize in the recipes "essential", "networking", etc.
This will be reflected in the package name and the destination
directory
($destdir), for example:
Package name: util-linux-2.34-x86_64+1#essential.tlz
It will be installed as: util-linux-2.34-x86_64+1#essential
This would make it easier to find the essential packages and other
series to be
installed or removed.
The "essential" label would deal with the minimum or essential
packages to run
the system.
What do you think?.
Hmm, how would it work if there was a lib that was required by another
program in another category? For example, you wish to build emacs and
it
requires XML support. `libxml` would probably be under a `#lib` or
maybe
`#networking` but emacs would be in `#editors` or something. How would
we know that you need libxml before emacs?
The package "hash tag" should not be used to determine dependencies,
instead it can be a complement to the package name, version,
architecture.
(disclaimer: emacs doesn't _require_ xml, it is optional. Just for
argument's sake.)
Metadata must be generated, the metadata that Qi generates for the
package is in text format. As you can see here:
http://rsync.dragora.org/v3/packages/x86_64/compressors/xz-5.2.4-x86_64+2.tlz.txt
Some dependencies are required before building a package, some are
optional, and some are required at runtime. The simplest thing is to
list what the package requires to work, that is, what it depends on,
commonly all dependencies are related to dynamic linking. The simplest
thing would be to list these requirements (for example, in the metadata
file) and have the new program analyze them, I guess.
What I saw years ago that some distributions based on Slackware do, is
that they add or list the packages that the package requires to work,
then the program in charge of verifying this, checks if it is installed
or if it doesn't try to download it, install it.
