On Fri, 2016-10-07 at 12:38 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
On Mon, 2016-10-03 at 20:03 +0000, John Florian wrote:On Mon, 2016-10-03 at 12:07 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote: If we do not 'support' livecd-iso-to-disk any more, we no longer support: 1) persistent storage (via overlays) 2) non-destructive write I've known for quite some time that livecd-tools was/is to be replaced with livemedia-creator, but only now did I realize that lm-c won't have persistent storage -- I simply have never had the time to explore it. I'm extremely dependent on the persistent storage as my whole day job revolves around making hundreds of little mostly- stateless appliances for data collection purposes and has so since F13 or so. These have been built with livecd-iso-to-disk and lots of glue via specialized kickstarts and other custom packages. These appliances leverage a stateless OS very robustness, but do expect some persistent storage for their management. So the above certainly caught my attention.There's a slight misconception in the above. livemedia-creator *creates the image files themselves*. We're not talking about that in this thread. We're talking about the tools for taking an image that's been created - whether by livecd-creator or livemedia-creator or anything else - and writing them to a USB stick.
I'm fine with that and I think it matches my understanding/expectations. Do one thing and do it we
The 'persistence' feature requires support both in the image itself and in the tool used to write it. I believe livemedia-creator-produced images are set up to support persistence, just like livecd-creator- produced images were.
I suspect this "support within the image" overlaps with some of the glue to which I referred. Once upon a time these live images auto-mounted their backing storage (where the immutable squashfs image is kept). Then that stopped working and I had to write
an init service to do the same. Whether that service is still needed or not, I haven't investigated -- it's been working happily.
The issue here is that we are discussing what tools for *writing the image to a USB stick* should be 'supported' / 'recommended' / whatever, and we'd kinda like to drop livecd-iso-to-disk from that group, but it is currently the only one of the 'write image to stick' tools which supports persistence. No-one's proposing dropping livecd-iso-to-disk entirely at present, so you will still be able to attempt to write sticks with persistent storage, but we are discussing effectively a downgrade in how much testing it gets and how much we care if it's broken.
I'm fine with all that. I certainly don't expect Fedora to cater to my specific needs, but I like to chime in now and then if it might help preserve some feature that everyone might otherwise feel is unused.
It is worth noting that we've never formally tested the persistence features in any case, so we would never have blocked a release for 'persistence doesn't work right' anyhow. But at present we do, by policy, block the release if writing sticks with livecd-iso-to-disk doesn't work.
No worries there. I/we've been testing it exhaustively. When I push an update to hundreds a machines (most of which are headless/keyboard-less and ill-suited for such attachments and work) that all deploy it autonomously, it has to "just work". Though
I would never suggest our mutation reflects what the real Fedora is doing. 
Are there plans to get persistent storage capabilities into lm-c? Also, after much work I managed to get my live ISO spins generated out of a private Koji setup. I see there a warning "spin-livecd is deprecated and will be replaced with spin-livemedia" -- I assume this related, true? If so, do any improvements to lm-c (say to add persistence) automagically benefit the "spin-livemedia" method in Koji?Well, yeah. 'spin-livecd' is the Koji method for creating images with livecd-creator; it's now deprecated and never used in the official Fedora Koji instance, Fedora live images are all now created with the 'spin-livemedia' method. 'spin-livemedia' is the Koji method for creating images with livemedia-creator.
So since what 'spin-livemedia' *does* is create a live image using livemedia-creator, of course any changes to livemedia-creator will be reflected when you create an image with the Koji 'spin-livemedia' method.
Thanks for all the feedback Adam. I'll start playing around with livemedia-creator to learn how my world needs to transform. It will be interesting to see how this all dovetails with the stateless support[0] that the systemd folks have (had?) been working
on.
--John Florian <john.florian@xxxxxxxx>
_______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
