[gentoo-soc] Gentoaster - Week 7 progress report

[gentoo-soc] Gentoaster - Week 7 progress report

[Liam McLoughlin]

Hey,

This week has been excellent in terms of progress. The Gearman
worker/client is now complete, and can be used to queue builds. I've
tested this setup on a few different machines and it seems pretty
solid as long as you configure the paths correctly. Also, as part of
this, builds will now isolate all their activity into a single
directory. It's not chrooted as such, like I said in my previous
progress report, because the use of binaries from the host is
required. I'm not entirely sure chrooting makes any sense after giving
it some more thought, because they'd still be root and they could
break back out of the chroot anyway. However, all input to this tool
is heavily sanitised before it reaches Gearman, so the potential
threats should be dealt with before they even reach the build tool.

So that's everything checked off what I said I'd be doing this week.
How much did I actually get done though? A whole lot more. I've
started and then made huge progress with my WebUI, and it's producing
working builds right now, however the interfaces are still quite rough
and need improvement still. Rather than try to explain what I've done,
check out the screencaps on my blog here:
http://hexxeh.net/?p=328117737

For a minimal image, the whole process from the welcome screen to
being booted into your image takes around 2 minutes. Some things are
still missing, some obvious to see, some not so obvious. The selection
options on the Locale screen are currently hardcoded, these have to be
loaded from a Stage3 or a preprepared list kept with the Stage3. The
Packages screen could use improvement to make package selection user
friendly, including the option of some commonly used predefined sets
of packages a user can pick to get for example a desktop environment
with a word processor up and running quickly. Also, some of the
customisation options are still missing. USE flags selection and
keywords to name a couple. The UI also needs general polish and extra
help messages to make it more user friendly. These are this weeks
tasks:

- Load timezones from Stage3/external list
- Load keyboard layouts from Stage3/external list
- Look into supporting more languages
- Add the rest of the customisation options in an expert mode of the wizard

I'm also hoping to add extra security measures on the WebUI the
following week in preparation for getting a public copy up and
running. I've ordered servers this week to power a large installation
of the system and so I should have no problems letting everyone try it
out once it's ready, no download/setup required. So that's my summary
of the past week, well ahead of schedule, going very well indeed.

Cheers,
Liam