| Time | Nick | Message |
|---|---|---|
| 12:46 | mchua | #chair sdziallas |
| 12:46 | #topic SoaS kickstart maintenance howto tutorial | |
| 12:46 | sdziallas: go! | |
| 12:46 | sdziallas | mchua: alrighty, so I'll talk you quickly through how to maintain this SoaS kickstart thingie. |
| 12:46 | mchua | git-spinkickstarts FAS group? |
| 12:46 | looking | |
| 12:46 | sdziallas | if you want the real gig, you'll need the fedora acl. |
| 12:46 | mchua | will document this process afterwards, of course |
| 12:46 | sdziallas | mchua: I can invite you. |
| 12:47 | mchua | #info become a member of the FAS (Fedora Account System) git-spinkickstart group. |
| 12:47 | sdziallas: go for it (mchua). | |
| 12:47 | sdziallas | mchua: which email address goes with your FAS account? |
| 12:47 | mchua: nvm. | |
| 12:48 | mchua: you gotta apply yourself (the name is: gitspin-kickstarts) - I can only send a random "please join Fedora" email. | |
| 12:48 | mchua: as soon as you do, I'll bother kanarip in #fedora-devel to approve you. | |
| 12:49 | mchua | sdziallas: Okay, one moment, let me do that. |
| 12:49 | #undo | |
| 12:49 | #info become a member of the FAS (Fedora Account System) gitspin-kickstarts group. | |
| 12:49 | proper docs :) | |
| 12:49 | sdziallas | grins. good stuff! |
| 12:51 | mchua | mutters at slowness of mobile broadband |
| 12:51 | sdziallas: in the meantime, it's stupid questions time! | |
| 12:51 | "what is a kickstart file?" | |
| 12:51 | "why do we need one?" | |
| 12:51 | "what does this have to do with SoaS?" | |
| 12:51 | "why would anyone care?" | |
| 12:51 | sdziallas | mchua: yay, stupid question time :) |
| 12:51 | mchua | wooo |
| 12:51 | sdziallas | it's basically the file that tells our awesome tools which packages to throw onto the image and which customizations to apply in the build process so that you get at the end a... |
| 12:52 | ...shiny... | |
| 12:52 | ...cool... | |
| 12:52 | Sugar on a Stick. *drumroll* | |
| 12:52 | mchua: so it provides the instructions for the tools what to do. | |
| 12:52 | mchua | So you input a <filename>.ks file, which is a text file with some special formatting listing packages and whatnot |
| 12:52 | and it spits out an .iso? | |
| 12:53 | sdziallas | mchua: right - the tool that eats the kickstart files is the livecd-creator (which comes in the livecd-tools package) |
| 12:53 | mchua | has applied to gitspin-kickstarts, finally |
| 12:53 | kicks mobile broadband | |
| 12:53 | sdziallas | so you'd do (as root) livecd-creator --config=$filename (and possibly --cache=$location) |
| 12:53 | mchua | Mobile broadband, I'm in *Atlanta.* That's a *city.* You should be *faaaaster.* |
| 12:53 | sdziallas | goes bothering kanarip |
| 12:53 | mchua: well, it's *Atlanta* ;) | |
| 12:54 | mchua | Meh, I'm sure Atlanta's cool. |
| 12:54 | Maybe someday I'll get the chance to actually walk around in it. | |
| 12:54 | Anyhoo. | |
| 12:54 | While you're doing that, I'll look for general existing .ks docs. | |
| 12:55 | sdziallas | mchua: this is for example what you want |
| 12:55 | #link http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/[…]and_use_a_Live_CD | |
| 12:55 | plus something like this (out of which you don't need everything, since we're going for a live image) | |
| 12:56 | #link http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda/Kickstart | |
| 12:56 | mchua: okay? | |
| 12:57 | mchua | Wow, the Fedora wik has confusing kickstart docs if you look for [[Kickstart]] or... huh. I'll fix that when my connection sucks less. |
| 12:58 | sdziallas | mchua: there are some strange docs in there, indeed. |
| 12:59 | mchua | s/wik/wiki |
| 12:59 | sdziallas | mchua: (want to move on or running out of time?) |
| 12:59 | mchua | Oh. My flight is boarding soon. |
| 12:59 | sdziallas: keep going. | |
| 12:59 | sdziallas | grins. |
| 12:59 | mchua | I'm usually one of the last to board anyway. |
| 12:59 | sdziallas | mchua: http://git.fedorahosted.org/gi[…]in-kickstarts.git |
| 12:59 | mchua: as soon as you're approved (not yet, apparently), git clone this: ssh://git.fedorahosted.org/git/spin-kickstarts.git | |
| 12:59 | this is our repo. | |
| 13:00 | well, it's the official Fedora repo, so better don't break it :) | |
| 13:00 | we've this semi-working SoaS repo at git.sl.o, but this one is what contains the fedora-livecd-soas.ks. | |
| 13:00 | that's the important stuff, the file that says what goes in there. | |
| 13:00 | thinks this is almost it for now. | |
| 13:01 | mchua | Okay. So... what does maintenance mean? |
| 13:01 | How often does this need to be looked at, and when? | |
| 13:01 | How do you decide what stuff changes and what doesn't? | |
| 13:01 | Does it have to be approved by someone else before SoaS can be a Spin? Each release cycle? How does that work? | |
| 13:01 | You mentioned weird scripty stuff that sometimes has to happen - other than a simple package list, I mean. What is that, and how does that work? | |
| 13:01 | sdziallas | mchua: well, it has been approved for this cycle, so the next cycles should be a quick yay / nay. |
| 13:02 | what needs to be done is *communication* | |
| 13:02 | (btw, if you clone this, make sure to add your name to Peter's and mine in the header of that file) | |
| 13:02 | mchua | Communication - how so? |
| 13:02 | sdziallas | mchua: as soon as a new activity gets build and into Fedora (and we think we want it), we need to add it. |
| 13:03 | mchua: because one needs to communicate with the packagers (which activity gets when packaged and is supposed to get in when) | |
| 13:03 | mchua | Aha. |
| 13:03 | Is there any sort of schedule or process or whatnot for doing that kind of communication now? | |
| 13:03 | And how do you decide that some package is going to make it into the kickstart? | |
| 13:03 | sdziallas | ...as well as with the developers ("ah, interesting, you need us to apply this GConf magic, interesting. better do this in the %post part... *fixfix*") |
| 13:03 | mchua | Is there some sort of criteria? |
| 13:04 | er, um... I don't need to be a packager for this, do I? | |
| 13:04 | sdziallas | well, there's no real schedule. |
| 13:04 | mchua | Because I'm kind of hopeless at the packaging thing right now. |
| 13:04 | sdziallas | we basically need to hurry since beta freeze is Tuesday. |
| 13:04 | mchua | Oh. |
| 13:04 | What does that mean? | |
| 13:04 | sdziallas | well, that's why you're communicating with the packagers. |
| 13:05 | that means that we need extra approval (uh, I might be wrong) for new updates. | |
| 13:05 | mchua | Any changes to the .ks file whatsoever? |
| 13:05 | Or just "I have added a new package to this list?" | |
| 13:05 | (like, if I edited a comment, that would not need to be reapproved after beta freeze?) | |
| 13:05 | sdziallas | well, I'd love to have this going to the list - I sucked at communicating changes. |
| 13:05 | well, the approval concerns only packagers. | |
| 13:05 | mchua | sdziallas: yeah, well, the documenting of this howto is my job now ;) |
| 13:06 | sdziallas | (uh, the approval of updates for activities and stuff) |
| 13:06 | mchua | So... okay, hang on. Trying to make sure I grok. |
| 13:06 | sdziallas | grins. |
| 13:06 | mchua | The beta freeze date you speak of is the Fedora beta freeze date, which applies to SoaS because we are a Fedora Spin. |
| 13:07 | sdziallas | ayup! |
| 13:07 | mchua | For this cycle (F13), the freeze is this coming Tuesday. |
| 13:07 | Which is, um, soon. | |
| 13:07 | sdziallas | right. but we can still make changes. |
| 13:07 | it just might be harder. | |
| 13:07 | mchua | Before that freeze date, we can edit the kickstart file to include any packages (from the Fedora repos) that we want - really easily, we just edit it and it's in. |
| 13:07 | After the freeze date, if we want to change the package list, we need to get individual changes to the package list approved by... who? | |
| 13:07 | (how far off am I?) | |
| 13:08 | sdziallas | mchua: mhm. |
| 13:08 | well, you can still change the package list. | |
| 13:08 | (until close to the release, nobody will care) | |
| 13:08 | it's just that for updated activites (as in, for the packagers) there might be some rel-eng approval process. | |
| 13:08 | (from Fedora) | |
| 13:08 | but that shouldn't affect you. | |
| 13:10 | mchua | Oh, oh, ok. So the beta freeze does not affect the ks maintainer directly. |
| 13:10 | But it's a good reminder to give packagers of things you want to ship, because their lives get harder after that point. | |
| 13:10 | And therefore the chances they'll actually finish stuff you want to include in your ks decrease. | |
| 13:11 | ? | |
| 13:11 | sdziallas | mchua: nope. well, at some point, the spin-kickstarts package will be frozen, but I think that's still further away. |
| 13:11 | yup, reminders are good. :) | |
| 13:11 | nods. | |
| 13:12 | mchua | there's a spin-kickstarts package? |
| 13:12 | sdziallas: what's that, and where do find these dates? | |
| 13:12 | sdziallas | mchua: yup. which gets composed from that repo. (but that's not... too important) |
| 13:13 | mchua: I think it's one of the last freezes, when it gets actually frozen. | |
| 13:13 | mchua: but really, just commit away to the repo ;) | |
| 13:14 | mchua | what if i mess up? |
| 13:14 | sdziallas | mchua: I'll fix it. |
| 13:15 | mchua | will anyone else be affected? this makes the nightly builds, right? |
| 13:15 | who's using them? | |
| 13:15 | (oh, and how do the nightly builds work?) | |
| 13:15 | sdziallas | mchua: right. the currently non-existing-huge-QA-team will notice that. |
| 13:15 | besides that, satellit_ is mostly testing them (good job!). | |
| 13:15 | mchua | #link http://alt.fedoraproject.org/p[…]ly-composes/soas/ |
| 13:15 | sdziallas | mchua: nirik composes them on a daily basis from this repo. |
| 13:15 | mchua | nightly composes magically pop out there. |
| 13:15 | afaik. | |
| 13:16 | sdziallas | #link http://scrye.com/wordpress-mu/[…]ly-live-composes/ |
| 13:16 | (details) | |
| 13:16 | mchua | Oh, cool. Yay! |
| 13:16 | Usefulness. | |
| 13:16 | sdziallas | :) |
| 13:17 | mchua | My battery is running low and I'm sitting on the plane, I have to wrap up pretty soon. |
| 13:17 | sdziallas | alright, I think we made it already pretty far! thanks for doing this :) |
| 13:17 | mchua | First step is, then, check out the kickstart file from git and look around and try to understand what's going on. |
| 13:17 | Then I'll probably poke you and go "I DON'T GET IT WHAT IS THIS" | |
| 13:17 | sdziallas | exactly! |
| 13:17 | mchua | and we'll do this again. |
| 13:17 | sdziallas | YAY! - I like this plan. |
| 13:18 | :) (seriously, in fact) | |
| 13:18 | mchua | #action mchua check out kickstart file and look around, queue up questions |
| 13:18 | Aaand I think that's it. | |
| 13:18 | Thanks, sdziallas! | |
| 13:18 | (this meeting has been brought to you by Operation: SoaS Community) | |
| 13:18 | sdziallas | Thank you, mchua! |
| 13:18 | mchua | #endmeeting |