[gentoo-soc] Gentoo Anaconda: pre-mid-term report

[gentoo-soc] Gentoo Anaconda: pre-mid-term report

[wiktor w brodlo]

Howdy Gentooers!


*Intro*

Gentoo Anaconda is a fork of Sabayon Anaconda which is a fork of
Fedora/Red Hat Anaconda. Anaconda is an installer for Linux disros,
originally for Fedora/RH but now it's distro-independent and many
other distros use it as their installer. Sabayon is a binary distro
based on Gentoo.


This report will try to sum up the first term and what are the plans
for the future.

So far everything the installer is on time and does all the things
that it was meant to do according to the proposal. Some things were
simplified, others required more work than I expected; however,
overall the installer does now install a working Gentoo with an X
server and a desktop environment (the latter might be buggy at times
as I've not yet had a chance to test all the DEs).

The future.
While developing this early release, I was making a list of
improvements and things I would like to see in the installer as well
as other tasks which I felt are not essential to produce a working
installer. Here are some of the points:
- Bump all Fedora packages to the newest versions. There are a few
packages from the Fedora projects and Sabayon's ebuilds refer to quite
aged versions – I'd like to bump as many of them as possible to Fedora
Core 15.
- Port the libiscsi patch to a never version of OpeniSCSI. The current
version is not only old, the ebuild uses an old EAPI which now forbids
multiple Python versions. Need to fix that.
- Do something about FCoE. I couldn't get this package to compile at
all on Gentoo (and I've noticed it was once available in Portage, then
it was removed because of the same reason). Since Anaconda allows
installing on FCoE storage, it would be useful to finally fix this
package. For now, I have faked FCoE checking (it always returns no
available storage).
- Compare the sabayonlive-tools package with what's already in baselayout.
- Automatically sync Portage and download a new stage3.
- Make the screens prettier ;-), and add a welcome screen as well as
chapter intro screens.
- (that could be considered as part of the previous point) Use a tree
instead of a list on the mirror selection screen.
- Break up copying of the Portage tree so that the user can see its
progress (now it looks like the installer has frozen)
- Tune the minimum filesystem size checking.
- Do something about the massive list of dependencies. Because of the
way Anaconda worked originally (simply copying the rootfs of the
medium it was installing from), Sabayon made all the tools Anaconda
needs *inside the new system* dependencies of Anaconda. Some of those
tools are not required to run Anaconda, and some are never even
touched by Anaconda – they need to be installed on the new system
before Anaconda proceeds with configuration. I want to hunt them all
down and remove them from the dependency list to keep the size of the
installer to the minimum
- Clean up dead code. Anaconda contains a lot of code that Gentoo
never uses, like yum/RPM support, different repositories etc. I want
to remove the unused code to make Anaconda more manageable. I have
also commented out a lot of code because I thought I'll never use it
but left it there just in case – and this code turned out to be
unneeded at all so I'll remove it.
As a long-term goal, I'd like to move all the packages from
anaconda-overlay to the official Portage tree. Some of the packages
are already there, like GRUB and OpeniSCSI but Anaconda needs some
specific patches for these packages to work – in such case I'd like to
add the patches. I'm looking for volunteers that would like to
maintain some of these packages – there are 24 packages in the tree
and I don't think I'll be able to maintain them all AND the installer
(of course some of them will be removed/merged).

I was also talking to Hexxeh on IRC about a possible merge of some our
our projects' backends, but that's still a long time away, if ever.

Wishing you all passing the midterm :)

~  w.

Re: [gentoo-soc] Gentoo Anaconda: pre-mid-term report

[Donnie Berkholz]

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On 13:19 Mon 11 Jul     , wiktor w brodlo wrote:
> So far everything the installer is on time and does all the things
> that it was meant to do according to the proposal. Some things were
> simplified, others required more work than I expected; however,
> overall the installer does now install a working Gentoo with an X
> server and a desktop environment (the latter might be buggy at times
> as I've not yet had a chance to test all the DEs).

Could you post a screenshot gallery of each page in the installer so we 
can see what it looks like?

> As a long-term goal, I'd like to move all the packages from 
> anaconda-overlay to the official Portage tree. Some of the packages 
> are already there, like GRUB and OpeniSCSI but Anaconda needs some 
> specific patches for these packages to work – in such case I'd like to 
> add the patches. I'm looking for volunteers that would like to 
> maintain some of these packages – there are 24 packages in the tree 
> and I don't think I'll be able to maintain them all AND the installer 
> (of course some of them will be removed/merged).

Most packages are pretty easy to maintain, actually, because the 
"typical" package is relatively simply and doesn't release that often.

-- 
Thanks,
Donnie

Donnie Berkholz
Admin, Summer of Code
Gentoo Linux and X.Org
Blog: http://dberkholz.com


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Re: [gentoo-soc] Gentoo Anaconda: pre-mid-term report

[wiktor w brodlo]

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Screenshots are available at <http://brodlo.net/anaconda>.
On 15 Jul 2011 16:02, "Donnie Berkholz" <dberkholz@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On 13:19 Mon 11 Jul , wiktor w brodlo wrote:
>> So far everything the installer is on time and does all the things
>> that it was meant to do according to the proposal. Some things were
>> simplified, others required more work than I expected; however,
>> overall the installer does now install a working Gentoo with an X
>> server and a desktop environment (the latter might be buggy at times
>> as I've not yet had a chance to test all the DEs).
>
> Could you post a screenshot gallery of each page in the installer so we
> can see what it looks like?
>
>> As a long-term goal, I'd like to move all the packages from
>> anaconda-overlay to the official Portage tree. Some of the packages
>> are already there, like GRUB and OpeniSCSI but Anaconda needs some
>> specific patches for these packages to work – in such case I'd like to
>> add the patches. I'm looking for volunteers that would like to
>> maintain some of these packages – there are 24 packages in the tree
>> and I don't think I'll be able to maintain them all AND the installer
>> (of course some of them will be removed/merged).
>
> Most packages are pretty easy to maintain, actually, because the
> "typical" package is relatively simply and doesn't release that often.
>
> --
> Thanks,
> Donnie
>
> Donnie Berkholz
> Admin, Summer of Code
> Gentoo Linux and X.Org
> Blog: http://dberkholz.com
>

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Re: [gentoo-soc] Gentoo Anaconda: pre-mid-term report

[Александр Берсенев]

I have a few questions about anaconda installer:

Are you installing a packages one by one or with one big emerge pkg1
pkg2 pkg3 ... command?
Are them installed from sources or from binary packages? How long it takes?

When Gentoo is installed can I use /root/anaconda-ks.cfg file for
installing next Gentoo with predefined parameters? Can I add some
commands in post-installation phase in this file, for example, to
unpack my own contents of /etc directory.

Can Gentoo be installed from flash drive? From network?

Best,
Alexander Bersenev

Re: [gentoo-soc] Gentoo Anaconda: pre-mid-term report

[wiktor w brodlo]

2011/7/15 Александр Берсенев <bay@hackerdom.ru>:
> I have a few questions about anaconda installer:
>
> Are you installing a packages one by one or with one big emerge pkg1
> pkg2 pkg3 ... command?

One by one. This way I can retry the installation automatically (with
e.g. MAKEOPTS="-j1") in case something fails.

> Are them installed from sources or from binary packages? How long it takes?

From source. It depends how long it takes, as usual. More cores and
more memory help speed up the installation.

> When Gentoo is installed can I use /root/anaconda-ks.cfg file for
> installing next Gentoo with predefined parameters?

I have not tested that yet. The extra Gentoo-specific settings are not
in this file yet I think, but that's on the list for the second term.

> Can I add some
> commands in post-installation phase in this file, for example, to
> unpack my own contents of /etc directory.

You will be able to.

> Can Gentoo be installed from flash drive? From network?

The goal (at least for now) is to let it install from the LiveDVD. If
you can boot the LiveDVD environment from anything else than a DVD
then yes, of course. All you need is a stage3 and a Portage tree – you
might be able to run Anaconda from a different environment but I can't
promise you anything.