README

I am the Lorax.  I speak for the trees [and images].

Tree building tools such as pungi and revisor rely on 'buildinstall' in
anaconda/scripts/ to produce the boot images and other such control files
in the final tree.  The existing buildinstall scripts written in a mix of
bash and Python are unmaintainable.  Lorax is an attempt to replace them
with something more flexible.


EXISTING WORKFLOW:

pungi and other tools call scripts/buildinstall, which in turn call other
scripts to do the image building and data generation.  Here's how it
currently looks:

   -> buildinstall
       * process command line options
       * write temporary yum.conf to point to correct repo
       * find anaconda release RPM
       * unpack RPM, pull in those versions of upd-instroot, mk-images,
         maketreeinfo.py, makestamp.py, and buildinstall

       -> call upd-instroot

       -> call maketreeinfo.py

       -> call mk-images (which figures out which mk-images.ARCH to call)

       -> call makestamp.py

       * clean up


PROBLEMS:

The existing workflow presents some problems with maintaining the scripts.
First, almost all knowledge of what goes in to the stage 1 and stage 2
images lives in upd-instroot.  The mk-images* scripts copy things from the
root created by upd-instroot in order to build the stage 1 image, though
it's not completely clear from reading the scripts.


NEW IDEAS:

Create a new central driver with all information living in Python modules.
Configuration files will provide the knowledge previously contained in the
upd-instroot and mk-images* scripts.


-- 
David Cantrell <dcantrell@redhat.com>