Steve Kemp's Blog

I've made some progress on the bootstrapping idea :)

As a proof of concept I wrote a simple script which will download *all* the required RPM files for an installation of Fedora-Core 6. (i386)

This downloads 348 .rpm files, which is about 700Mb. (I'm downloading way more files than I need, because I'm not using dependency-discovery yet....)

However the proof of concept works. I can successfully chroot inside the unpackaged directory tree - so I think it is sufficient to persuade me that I can dynamically determine which RPM files need to be installed. This avoiding the problem which rpmstrap suffers from. (ie. having a static list of specific RPM version to fetch.)

If you'd like to test my script, hardwired as it is, (did I mention ugly?), then feel free. In terms of requirements you'll need:

• wget
• rpm
• alien

Note: I'd expect this script to take in the order of 30-40 minutes to run. It is pretty noisy though, so you'll know it hasn't died!

The script will live here for a day or two:

• http://steve.org.uk/Software/tmp/fc6

PS. Don't run this as root. Please.

Bootstrapping non-Debian distributions suck.

The only available tool appears to be rpmstrap which quite frankly fails more often than it works.

Since my xen-tools project needs to do carry out this kind of operation I've been pondering the idea of writing a tool which will install CentOS/Fedora/SuSE into a directory, in a similar fashion to debootstrap.

If there's nothing out there that you can point to, then I think that will be my next project.

My blog compiler received a bit of love recently, primarily because MJ Ray wanted to use it.

As mentioned before I've added a simple spooling system, and the mercurial repository now contains a simple RSS importer.

In other news I've been working on various Debian packages, here is a brief summery:

bash-completion

After seeing a RFH bug I closed a few bash-completion bugs, and submitted patches for a couple more.

I was intending to do more, but I'm still waiting for the package code to be uploaded to the the alioth project.

javascript work

I've updated the jquery package I uploaded to follow the new "Javascript standard" - in quotes only because it is both minimal and new.

Once the alioth project has been configured I'll upload my sources.

Apache2

I've agreed to work on a couple of SSL-related bugs in the Apache 2.x package(s) - time disappeared but I hope to get that done this weekend.

Initially that was because I was hoping I could trade a little love for getting a minor patch applied to mod_vhost_alias - instead I've now copied that module into libapache2-mod-vhost-bytemark and we'll maintain our own external module.

I've been loaned a Nokia 770 which is very nice. Having used it with vim, ssh & etc I think that I'd rather have a device with a real keyboard.

The Nokia 810 looks pretty ideal for me. I'm going to be asking around to see if I can get a donated/loaned device to play with for a while before I take the plunge and pay for one of my own.

I've got a couple more things on the go at the moment, but mostly being outdoors is more interesting to me than the alternative. Hence the downturn in writing and releasing security advisories.

I'll pick things up more fully over the coming weeks I'm sure.

ObQuote: Shaun of the Dead