Am Donnerstag, den 11.06.2020, 12:02 +0200 schrieb Johannes Schauer: > Hi, > > Quoting Benjamin Drung (2020-06-11 10:52:43) > > > > bdebstrap is an alternative to debootstrap and a wrapper around > > > > mmdebstrap to support YAML based configuration files. It > > > > inherits > > > > all > > > > benefits from mmdebstrap. The support for configuration allows > > > > storing > > > > all customization in a YAML file instead of having to use a > > > > very > > > > long > > > > one-liner call to mmdebstrap. It also layering multiple > > > > customizations > > > > on top of each other, e.g. to support flavors of an image. > > > > > > Just curious, how does it compare to vmdb2, besides using > > > mmdebstrap > > > instead of debootstrap. > > > > Before developing bdebstrap, I evaluated vmdb2 and borrowed the > > idea of > > using YAML. > > > > The big difference besides mmdebstrap/deboostrap is that vmdb2 > > creates > > a disk image and bdebstrap create a tarball or squashfs image. > > > > This serves us two use cases: > > > > 1) building live systems to use for booting over the network > > > > 2) installing the tarball on two disks (the OS on a 2.5" disk and > > the > > /boot directory on an SD card). Work in progress for the install > > script: > > https://github.com/bdrung/bdebstrap/blob/install-image/install-image > > additionally, it seems to inherit the following properties from > mmdebstrap: > > - building an image with SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH set produces bit-by-bit > reproducible output: > > $ ./bdebstrap -c examples/Debian-unstable.yaml --name example1 > --env SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH=1591868595 Yes, and it goes a bit further: If no SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH is specified, it will set it to the current timestamp and record it in its output config.yaml. So you have a configuration for bit-by-bit rebuild of the image. > - building an image does not require superuser privileges Yes. That was one reason for us to switch from debootstrap to mmdebstrap. Let me tell the story of bdebstrap for whom is interested in it: When I joined IONOS (it was called ProfitBricks back then), we had a Shell script that was used for building Debian live systems, which basically called debootstrap, installed some package, copied configurations and did other modifications to the resulting root tarball. That live system used a custom built initrd with a pre-build busybox binary. I ported it to use initramfs-tools for building the initrd and added a tmpfs boot mode to initramfs-tools (see Debian bug #864777). Thanks to the flexibility of initramfs-tools, all the needed modifications could be done via scripts. The next big step was to replace the tmpfs boot mode with live-boot (which uses a squashfs image and tmpfs overlays). Our build script was still custom, long and required root permission to run. During all this time, I looked at different build tools and then mmdebstrap came along. I tried it out and it seemed to be a very good fit. Johannes Schauer helped in a timely manner to address all those bug reports that I opened for mmdebstrap (thanks for that). It took me quite some git commits to split and reorder our build script so that it can call mmdebstrap and use hooks for all the customization at the different stages. The build shell script ended up to more or less just contain a multi-line call to mmdebstrap as well as the support for flavors. Since mmdebstrap had such simple user interface and only produce one output file/directory, I decided to write bdebstrap for using YAML files and put multiple files (config.yaml, manifest, and others) in the output directory. Now our live images can be build with only open source tools and packages from Debian. The README.md / man page of bdebstrap describes the minimal bits for building such live system. Our in-house YAML configuration is over 200 lines long. bdebstrap is intended to stay and I have enough other work besides reworking our build system again. -- Benjamin Drung DevOps Engineer and Debian & Ubuntu Developer Platform Integration (IONOS Cloud) 1&1 IONOS SE | Greifswalder Str. 207 | 10405 Berlin | Germany E-mail: benjamin.drung@cloud.ionos.com | Web: www.ionos.de Hauptsitz Montabaur, Amtsgericht Montabaur, HRB 24498 Vorstand: Dr. Christian Böing, Hüseyin Dogan, Dr. Martin Endreß, Hans- Henning Kettler, Arthur Mai, Matthias Steinberg, Achim Weiß Aufsichtsratsvorsitzender: Markus Kadelke Member of United Internet Diese E-Mail kann vertrauliche und/oder gesetzlich geschützte Informationen enthalten. Wenn Sie nicht der bestimmungsgemäße Adressat sind oder diese E-Mail irrtümlich erhalten haben, unterrichten Sie bitte den Absender und vernichten Sie diese E-Mail. 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