Hey,
a few weeks have already passed since my last email, so I figured I’d give
you all a quick status update.
I have been toiling away at getting things in shape for a first release. In
particular:
1. Remote builds are now implemented in “build” (but not yet in “batch”) as
a proof-of-concept. Eventually, I would like to make it simple to leverage
additional capacity to reduce the time for a full build of distri.
2. Speaking of which, numerous issues have been fixed to make a full build
of distri succeed (including bootstrapping from a previous revision). This
has not been done in a long time, and it showed.
3. linux and distri1 hooks are now added to “install” so that kernel images
on the /boot partition, corresponding initrds, GRUB config, and the /init
executable are kept up to date.
4. The wrapper programs I spoke about in the last update now expose the
destination path in an ELF section for programmatic consumption by dracut.
5. lightdm is now packaged (preferred over xdm). To make this work, I made
“install” call out to systemd-{tmpfiles,sysusers} as required so now
users/groups/tempfiles are configured declaratively, and we can remove a
bunch of hard-coded setup from “pack” soon.
6. The kbd package and the kbd-neo keymap are now packaged. I outlined in
https://twitter.com/zekjur/status/1145090505610584065 how to set the entire
system’s keymaps to neo, including in the initrd. Together with selecting a
larger font, this makes early boot way more pleasant. Speaking of, I
enabled lvm2’s integration with udev so that dracut now works from within
distri, too.
7. “pack” now produces a more complete installation. E.g., now
/etc/crypttab, /etc/fstab, /etc/shells, etc. are written.
There are a few technical blockers left, and then a bigger chunk of
articles, documentation, presentation, website work, etc. I will reach out
once any of that is in a state to be reviewed :)
Thanks and talk soon
