Re: Recent ITPs...
On Thu, May 27, 2004 at 11:14:40AM -0500, John Goerzen wrote:
> On Wed, May 26, 2004 at 04:01:55PM +0200, Sven Luther wrote:
> > On Wed, May 26, 2004 at 08:20:06AM -0500, John Goerzen wrote:
> > > I forgot to CC this list on two recent ITPs I've made, both of which are
> > > now in incoming:
> > >
> > > 1. Cash, the Caml Shell system.
> > >
> > > 2. dfdsbuild, an OCaml app that builds Debian From Scratch ISO images.
> > >
> > > All code of any significant size in this app is written in OCaml, and
> > > I have a statically-linked ocamlopt-generated binary for /bin/init
> > > on the initrd that is generated for the system.
> >
> > John, could you comment more on the functionality of this second package ?
> >
> > Is it a debian installer like thing, or some process for generating
> > 'Debian from scratch' iso images ? Depending from where you group the
> > words, there could be more than one interpretation about it.
>
> dfsbuild is a package that generates the Debian From Scratch ISO images.
Ok, i almost thought this was it, the other interpretation would have
been a debootstrap/debian-installer reimplementation or something.
> The resulting images, if the default configuration is used, contain a
> very complete live rescue filesystem as well as enough to use
> cdebootstrap to install the base system of all three current i386 trees
> and amd64 sid.
Sounds very nice, i wonder if a powerpc version of this would be easily
possible, mmm, ...
> dfsbuild itself is highly configurable, letting the user control what is
> put on the CD, what mirrors are used to obtain packages, what kernel
> images are used, etc.
>
> Two programs that go on the CD are also written in OCaml. The first,
> /sbin/init on the initrd (initial ramdisk) is responsible for
> discovering which CD-ROM drive holds the DFS CD and mounting it. The
> second, startup, takes control immediately after the DFS CD is mounted
> and root is pivoted. It prepares /etc/fstab and the runtime ramdisk,
> then finally passes control to the real /sbin/init to bring up the
> system. Both of these two are statically-linked ocamlopt-generated
> binaries. They are statically-linked because we don't know at compile
> time what version of libc the user is going to have installed on the CD
> (you can pick which Debian dist you want on there; if dfsbuild was
> compiled on unstable but the user is building a testing CD, then the
> resulting binary may not work.)
Very cool indeed.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
Reply to: