Re: [Xen-devel] RE: [RFC][PATCH] create an initrd for dom0 in install.shscript

[Harry Butterworth <harry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 2006-03-31 at 23:12 +0300, Muli Ben-Yehuda wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 30, 2006 at 04:20:52PM -0500, Aron Griffis wrote:
> > Harry Butterworth wrote:  [Thu Mar 30 2006, 03:09:44PM EST]
> > > Does anyone have any idea what the best way of determining what distro
> > > is installed is?
> > 
> > Test for the existence of the following files:
> > 
> >     /etc/redhat-release
> >     /etc/SuSE-release
> >     /etc/gentoo-release
> >     /etc/debian_version
> >         - in this case, check for ubuntu by reading /etc/lsb-release,
> >           which will contain something like:
> >             DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
> >             DISTRIB_RELEASE=5.10
> >             DISTRIB_CODENAME=breezy
> >             DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu (The Breezy Badger Release)"
> 
> Is this really the best way to go about this? it seems to me that this
> problem (creating a kernel + initrd pair in a way that matches the
> current distro) is inherently distro specific, and we should be using
> the distro-specific tools to do it - e.g., make-kpkg on debian. Any
> other approach seems too brittle.

It was my impression that make-kpkg on debian doesn't create an initrd
but that the initrd is created when the kernel-image is installed.

Calling the distro mkinitrd script will hide all the distro specific
aspects of initrd creation---the only problem is that the interface to
mkinitrd is not standard across distros so I'll have to write a wrapper.

I think we should leave it to the distro package maintainers to do a
perfect integration with their distro but I think for developers working
with unstable (especially newcomers) it is useful if the default build
actually comes up with something that will run---which now requires
generation of an initrd.

An alternative would be for the distro package maintainers to push their
package build stuff upstream to make it possible to build the distro
packages directly from the unstable sources.

Harry.


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