[Rule-list] Slinky questions

[Ed Blackman]

On Thu, Aug 08, 2002 at 08:20:35AM -0400, Michael Fratoni wrote:
> On Thursday 08 August 2002 03:42 am, Ed Blackman wrote:
> > A couple of questions about the compressed filesystem on disk 1:
> > - What is the purpose of the /usr/lib/rpm/{rpmrc,macros} files?  I
> >   can't find anything that references them.
> 
> If I remember correctly, rpm needs them. It's been a while since I added 
> those files, so I'll have to test and see if that's correct. I know I had 
> a good reason at the time. ;)

Never mind, I found it.  setup.sh copies the /usr directory over to
the new root, and that brings the /usr/lib/rpm/ files over.

> > - I know that the binaries are statically linked, but what are they
> >   linked against?  Standard glibc?  If so, have you considered using
> >   one of the smaller libc's?
> 
> The binaries are linked against uClibc, a very small implimentation of 
> libc.  http://www.uclibc.org/uClibc.html

Dang!  I was going to suggest that, and you go and implement it months
beforehand.  <grin>

> What version of the installer are you using? Recent versions use the ash 
> shell, which has much more functionality that the older versions, which 
> used the busybox msh shell.

I'm using 0.2.9.  

> I've found most 'bash' style syntax works as expected.

I guess the most frustration on my part comes from not being able to
use data structures (lists, associative arrays, etc).  For example, in
the partitioning and formatting code, there are a lot of "invoke fdisk
-l and parse the output" calls.  It would be cleaner to have all that
information gathered in one place, so that any code that needed a
piece of that information could just retrieve it.  But that's nearly
impossible to do in shell script, since you'd have to stuff
hierarchical information ("There are two disks on the system, hda and
hdb. hda has two linux partitions, hda1 and hda5.  hda1 has 664312
blocks, is a regular linux partition, and should be formatted ext2
...") down to a flat string. 

> You mean a different shell?

No, a real language, albeit a small one.  One possibility, Lua
(http://www.lua.org), is 77k statically linked.

> I'm willing to entertain the idea if it is small enough. I also want
> to make the system usable when booted from the installer floppy (as
> a rescue disk, for example) without having people stumbling over an
> unfamiliar shell.

The shell would still be there for rescue purposes, but wouldn't be
used for a regular install, which would be a Lua script.

> I use a set of scripts to automate the build process.

Are they available somewhere?  I looked around on the project web page
and couldn't find anything.  If not, would you mind sharing them?

Ed
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