Hi John,
Am 30.04.2024 um 18:09 schrieb John W. Himpel john@jlhimpel.net:
On Mon, 2024-04-29 at 13:01 +0200, Peter Boy wrote:
Hi Folks,
Here is my attempt at an updated brief summary of the current status as a first impetus for our discussion at the upcoming meeting on May
Our initial information that Kiwi can also be used for the generation of iso files is currently not applicable in this form. We will create the iso files in unchanged form for at least a few more releases.
Peter,
I'm a bit confused about what you are trying to say in the paragraph above. The meaning of the first sentence above escapes me. Would you kindly help out a senior citizen (me) with perhaps a rephrasing or a bit more detail?
I try my best :-)
You can find different information about what Kiwi can and cannot do. In any case, Kiwi is currently built into the Fedora release engineering infrastructure to the extent that it can be used to create images of bootable file systems, transfer them to the appropriate repositories, create checksums and also perform some QA tests.Iso images are generated as before, without Kiwi being involved or being able to get involved. So we cannot use Kiwi in F41 for ISO images, even though Kiwi might be able to do this (I can find different statements on this). The same probably also applies to F42, if I imagine the amount of work involved in carrying out such a conversion. At present, this would not be available in the infrastructure. That's what I meant by 'not applicable'.
If we don't want to spend another number of releases with the current outdated iso files (and that seems very bad to me), then we should start tackling the issues now, starting with the oldest one.
I seem to recall that the gentleman making the presentation and Kevin suggested starting by creating as an exact duplicate of a current iso as possible using the new kiwi features. Then begin tackle resolving differences between different installation methods and media.
Yes, if Remember correctly we were discussing to start with Kiwi to create the KVM image at this point. And yes, try to make as exact a duplicate als possible of the ISO files.
Since both the presenter and Kevin volunteered to assist us and help "walk us though the media generation process", they seemed to feel this distributing Fedora Server with existing content was doable for F41 and rationalizing the installation results across the different images and media was a realistic goal for F42.
As far as I remember, we have found it feasible to migrate the configuration files. But not to actually use it in the infrastructure. Because we didn't know what the current status was. That's why we agreed to contact RelEng as soon as F40 was published and discuss the next steps.
We don't have to decide at the moment which tool we will use to create our images in the future. We would be busy with the iso files for the time being.
Instead, we could discuss with RelEng what tools are available and which is best. And in what timeframe the changeover needs to take place.
Kiwi may not be optimal for us as we would have to maintain another set of configuration files instead of using Kickstart files throughout. Therefore, our situation differs from Cloud, which does not need to create iso files for Cloud VMs. But there may be no other solution that is better for us. And in the end, it also comes down to choosing a solution that can be managed with the resources available to Fedora (i.e. releng).
!proposed: So I propose to postpone the decision about image generation for now.
If you have more information that was not presented at the video meeting that led to your conclusion, then I would welcome hearing that information.
I don't have more information, but this is a result of my mulling over the situation. Kiwi ist best for cloud, I suppose, because they need just one type of images. Releng has a broader view (and range of tasks), which may be more in line with our situation. We need different types of images. We should discuss the possible options with RelEng,
Best Peter
-- Peter Boy https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Pboy PBoy@fedoraproject.org
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