Re: Publishing raw generic{,cloud} images without tar, and without compression, plus versionning of point releases

[Bastian Blank <waldi@debian.org>]

On Wed, May 27, 2020 at 10:39:01AM +0200, Thomas Lange wrote:
> fai-diskimage has the option -S which specifies the raw disk size. We
> set this in debian_cloud_images/cli/build.py to 2G for genriccloud
> images. It should be easy to set this to maybe 550M.

Sadly it is not that easy.  A whole bunch of temporary data is deleted
in the final stages of the build process.

What we can do, and I already thought about: circumvent fai-diskimage
completely and make the filesystem and image ourselves.

This allows for:
- Better defined interface between build tool and fai config, aka
  - no more running tests within,
  - no more writing files with names derived from some environment
    variable,
  - properly cleanup the build process of stray processes.
- Support containers, which are defined by a tar, not a filesystem.
- Generate filesystems smaller, as no temporary storage is needed.
- Maybe even: create partially reproducible images.

Regards,
Bastian

-- 
Schshschshchsch.
		-- The Gorn, "Arena", stardate 3046.2