Re: Ruby parser for kickstart files

[Michael DeHaan <mdehaan@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 08/21/2009 10:56 AM, Chris Lumens wrote:

I am looking to build a Ruby on Rails application for creating Fedora
spins/remixes.
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Remixes_Web_Interface
    

I'm curious why you'd want to do this when most all the rest of the
Fedora web infrastructure involves python.
  

There's /nothing/ wrong with using another web development platform if you like it better.

Fedora should not have any language preferences.

Despite being a Python fan, having been on the wrong side of language wars before, I won't support them, and they are wrong for lots of reasons.

However you make one very good point below:

The problem is that I cannot find a suitable Ruby parser for kickstart
files and writing one from scratch is what I'm trying to avoid.

Could someone please point me to the correct direction here.
Plan B is to switch to Django, which would enable me to use pykickstart.
    

pykickstart is the canonical kickstart file parser, being used by at
least a half dozen projects here.  If you have to use another one or
write your own, you're going to have to play catch up when I need to
make changes to it.
  

That point is Anaconda is itself using pykickstart.

Fortunately though, there's absolutely no reason something building kickstarts /needs/ pykickstart.

It's just as simple to build a system that /templates out/ kickstarts from any arbitrary templating framework.

(Cobbler already does this, using Cheetah, though you could pick erb).

In the case of pykickstart, this is nice, because pykickstart running on EL 4 can't create a Fedora 11 compatible kickstart anyway.... it doesn't know about the new tags.

With a templating system, you could run your kickstart generator on any platform, and it wouldn't matter what version of pykickstart you had.

Of course, if you want to /parse/ kickstarts and not just generate them you need pykickstart, no doubt.

Yet, if you are just building a tool that generates kickstarts -- which is what the input to livecd-creator and such really is -- and it's not complicated -- I really don't see any need for a parser there.

The parser would be useful if you wanted someone to upload their own kickstart and then make programmatic changes to it -- but, if you're making a live CD or whatever, I'm not sure that's required or even all that useful.

--Michael

_______________________________________________
Kickstart-list mailing list
Kickstart-list@xxxxxxxxxx
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/kickstart-list