Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2012 10:06:00 +0100
From: Natanael Copa <ncopa@alpinelinux.org>
To: lists+alpine-devel@jimpryor.net
Cc: alpine-devel@lists.alpinelinux.org
Subject: Re: [alpine-devel] Re: Understanding alpine-setup
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On Sun, 04 Mar 2012 05:19:31 -0500
lists+alpine-devel@jimpryor.net wrote:

> Thanks Paul for the reply; that helps give me some guidance.
> 
> I'm still reading the setup scripts to get a general overview though.
> Some more questions...
> 
> * In setup-interfaces, in various places, the response "abort" is
> parsed but undocumented. Intentional?

Not intentional.

I had at some point the idea of having "abort" as a standard way to get
out. That idea never "took off" and have not been consequently
implemented.

Things like this should probably be documented *before* we start a new
setup script implementation.

> * Perhaps not a problem, but I notice that "none" is only accepted by
> setup-lbu interactively. You can't pass it in via the LBUOPTS variable
> in an ANSWERFILE read by alpine-setup. On the other hand, you can pass
> "none" to setup-apkcache in that way. Just verifying that this
> difference is intended. Is the idea that running setup-lbu isn't
> optional if the diskmode isn't "sys"? (But then why permit "none" as
> an interactive answer?)

No this is not intentional. This is a result of different contributors
having different ideas of how things should work. The unattended stuff
is something that I think needs to be re-implemented.
 
> * setup-cryptswap tries to apk add cryptsetup-luks, but this package
> doesn't exist (anymore)? Should it just be cryptsetup?

This is another example of a script that was written once many years
ago, but never used. When things moved on (switching to openrc) we
never verified that this still works. I probably does not and should
most likely be removed.
 
> About to dive into setup-bootable and setup-disk now. It looks like
> setup-bootable (like setup-cryptswap and some others) is only invoked
> manually, correct?
 
Yes.

Setup-bootable is not really related the other setup-* scirpts. Its a
tool that helps you get the contents over from the .iso image to an
USB or CF. So its a tool to create new bootables from an already
installed system.

When it comes to setup-bootable, I am not 100% of how to handle its
future because it is supposed to solve various different (but still
simlar) problems. I'll summarize them up here:

* First time install. A user discovers the existance of Alpine Linux
  and want create a bootable USB for first time boot. He/she have only
  read about cdrom in the history books but have never seen any cd
  player. We distribute .iso only.

  Theoretically, its very simple. Just treat the .iso as an archive,
  extract the files to a FAT formatted usb and run syslinux. (and
  make sure that the MBR is ok). You can do this from windows with 7zip
  and syslinux.exe (and fdisk /mbr?) But it would be handy to have
  tools for it. (yeah I know about unetbootin and pendrive linux but i
  think those are clumsy)

* A long time Alpine Linux user wants create yet another boot USB. It
  could be for upgrading an existing install or setting up a new box.
  This is what setup-bootable solves.


-nc


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