On 08/21/2014 08:16 PM, Jean-Christian de Rivaz wrote:
Many thanks David for sharing all of this. I have found some of inspiring code in your work.
I'm glad that it is helpful!
The .preinst files is something that I have not yet taken the time to understand as well as I should yet, so you should not trust me as absolute expert on this. It is my understanding, though, that when multistrap runs, there is nothing in the chroot, so preinst scripts can't run before we unpack because there is no /bin/sh or any of the commands or programs that the scripts will use. This can cause problems, for example, I had to prevent the sudo.preinst script from running because it will delete the /etc/sudoers file that has been unpacked. However, looking at the sudo.preinst script, I can see that it does not do anything important, so it is ok that it does not run.I am a bit confused about the call of all *.preinst scripts between the unpacking and the setting. As far as I understand the Debian Policy Manual, the *.preinst scripts are to be called before the unpacking, so this should be a task of multistrap but it don't seem to do that (at least in multistrap 2.1.20). Or maybe I misunderstand something.
I think that this is the problem that the bootstrap.debian.net project is trying to solve, but we have not found any other problems doing it this way, so I have not looked into it any farther.
Yes, my goal is that any file included by brickstrap (root/ folder) will 100% never change, otherwise it should go in a package, which I have done for some cases already. There are probably still a few other files that should be put into packages, but there are some files that don't make sense in packages. For example there is no reason to have fstab or hosts in a package. Some files are also only there so that everything gets configured correctly but are not included in the disk image (see tar-exclude file).I wonder why you don't use a local package to modify files like you wants. I suspect that this will simplify your tool and will allow modification on an upgrade of the system.
Anyway, brickstrap is very interesting to study a working example.